Collaborations between artists and luxury fashion have become increasingly ubiquitous as both brands and consumersseek to elevate their cultural status. Fashion houses utilise their substantial resources to borrow museum objects, artworksand reproduce artist’s IP to lend legitimacy and authenticity to their brand. However many luxury fashion houses also havetheir own collections of artworks, archives and objects. Although much about these collections doesn’t cross the publicradar, they are frequently drawn upon across almost every touchstone within the brand. From loans and acquisitions, topacking and transport, using the Burberry Archive as a case study we will explore the similarities and differences betweenmanaging a luxury fashion archive versus a public museum collection, and what both can learn from the other.

The Registrars: Training for the Future programme is a collaboration between the University of Leeds (UoL), the RoyalArmouries and Leeds Museums and Galleries, and it is funded by Arts Council England. The aim of the programme is to train the new generation of registrars, filling the gap in the formal training of museum registrars. The trainee registrar spends 5 months in Leeds Museums and Galleries and 5 months at the Royal Armouries. The trainee also becomes a student of the Master of Arts (MA) in Art Gallery and Museum Studies, being awarded a Postgraduate certificate by the UoL. During this time, the training activities range from managing incoming and outgoing loans, acquisitions, and disposals, to couriering, risk management and using different collections management systems.
In this talk, I will discuss my personal experience as this year’s trainee registrar within the programme: the challenges faced, strengths and weaknesses of the programme, as well as its contribution to my career development. As a student at the UoL, I will also share my views on the perceptions that students in the Art Gallery and Museum Studies MA programme have about the different roles in museums and what they entail, as well as on how they can apply to these jobs. I will finish giving an overview of a careers day that I organised for my student cohort at the UoL in the RoyalArmouries Museum.

This talk will explore how the law is responding to new technologies as they are being deployed within the creative sectors, comparing the approach in different jurisdictions.
NFTs and blockchain technologies exploded into the art world in 2021 and have had mixed fortunes since. In the past 18 months they have been overshadowed by AI, which has presented new opportunities for museum practice in many areas.
Both of these new technologies present legal and ethical challenges to museums and public institutions keen to benefit from what they offer on many fronts. Use cases for both technologies might involve: securing provenance and establishing authenticity; rights management; archiving and record keeping; loan management; audience engagement; storage and conservation.
Regulation of both technologies is in its infancy. Case law is developing around NFTs, as well as AI, but legislation is scantin many jurisdictions. The recently adopted EU AI Act is world-leading and set to enter into force over coming months and years, but its impact is yet to be felt. In the UK, a laissez faire approach is currently in evidence and in the US, whilst legislation is not yet formulated, case law is developing more rapidly.
One of the principal issues raised for museums around both these technologies is copyright law. Guidance will be offered on how museums can navigate the complex questions which arise and what best practice principles are emerging.

In early 2024 the V&A acquired the David Bowie Archive. Comprising over 80,000 items, the archive is an important portrait of one of the most ground-breaking and influential artists of all time. Spanning the entirety of Bowie’s career, it features letters, sheet music, handwritten lyrics, original costumes, photography, film, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments, album artwork and awards. It also includes more intimate writings, thought processes and unrealised projects, the majority of which have never been seen in public before.
From 2025, this unparalleled collection will be made accessible to the public through the creation of The David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts at V&A Storehouse in East London. The acquisition and creation of The Centre has been made possible thanks to the David Bowie Estate and a generous donation of £10m from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group.
In our presentation, we will share the logistics behind transporting a major acquisition of such significance and scale from the United States to the United Kingdom via sea-freight. Using the shipment of the Bowie Archive as case study and drawing up from the Museum’s wide experience using sea-freight for touring exhibitions since 2004, we will reflect on the opportunities and challenges this means of transport presents. Topics like risks, costs, insurance and indemnity, preparation time, or innovation in remote supervision will be discussed, as well as the significant environmental benefits derived from opting for sea-freight, contributing to the reduction of the Museum's carbon footprint.

During the past few decades, acquisition challenges for contemporary museums included dealing with time-based mediaworks, co-commissions with an artist or gallery, installation works and performance/live art. More recently, institutions aretroubled with acquiring Non-Fungible Token art, internet art, co-commissions between multiple museums or evenbiennales, works with multiple shared ownership and even, Artificial Intelligence.
Registrars are increasingly called to grapple with emerging and often transient technologies that do not necessarily fit inthe context of the museum’s duty for perpetual preservation. We must open our collection storage for a more democraticmodel of ‘access to all’ making it no different to gallery spaces. We must ponder what sustainable collecting means, in aworld that demands climate action from everyone. We must have the ability to manage complex legal risks around artists’intellectual property in a global culture of appropriation for social-media promoting.
While contemporary museums continue to collect new media, from unconventional sources, by untested methods ofacquisition, and we must follow the artists who push the boundaries from physical to digital, there is still no school forregistrars and no trusted curriculum that will help them manage all the challenges. This paper offers insights from the M+Museum’s last twelve years of building a collection in the 21st century collecting. It considers opportunities andchallenges, and proposes practical ideas on the acquisition, care, display and access of collections for public engagement.

Archaeological collections all over Europe, though valuable from a scientific point of view, often, by their specificity andbulk finds, pose a challenge for museum professionals, when admitting them to a museum collection. This is also the casein Poland, due to specific legal regulations regarding ownership and the process of accepting artifacts into museum.Archaeological artifacts are the property of the Polish State. Its officials decide where artifacts go after finding. Thedecisions they issue to hand over objects to the museum are in fact only a fiction, furthermore nobody does control theirimplementation. Unfortunately, it is in the interest of museums to avoid receiving artifacts, due to the lack of storage spaceand the State's poor support in caring for archaeological heritage. Moreover, archaeological artifacts must be cataloguingindividually. Exactly the same is required to record other categories of museum collections. Paradoxically, therefore, theway of recording piece of art and bulk find is equated. Neither the state nor the museums understand what is the numberof archaeological monuments in Poland. This situation has been going on for 20 years, and registrars, dealing with thereality of archaeology in Polish museums, have developed mechanisms for receiving antiquities to enter them in theinventory. Using the example of acquiring artifacts from several archaeological sites, we will present the problems of Polisharchaeological museology and active attempts to musealize this collection by designing an acquisition procedure andinvolving researchers in the process.