Wallace Collection archive and library saved

News earlier this month that the Wallace Collection, London, was consulting on the closure of its library and archive to the public led to an outcry and online petition. A campaign to try and prevent the closure was launched by a group of archive professionals and trade unionists working with the Wallace Collection staff and the Public and Commercial Services trade union. The Wallace Collection’s library contains about 30,000 books and periodicals relating to the museum collection, some of which are not held by other art history libraries, whilst the archive includes the papers of the Wallace Collection’s founders and other records and is designated as a ‘Place of Deposit’ for public records under the 1958 Public Records Act. The closure plans, which were described by the campaign’s organisers as ‘short-sighted and ill thought out’, would have meant redundancies for two full time members of staff. The petition argued that Wallace Collection director, Xavier Bray, ‘wants to orientate the museum to income generation and does not view the library and archive as part of this’. Moreover, questions about archives that were donated on the condition that they were publicly available, and on how curatorial staff would manage the book and archive collections that require specialist skills, have not been answered.
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By the close of consultation on 11 February, the petition had attracted almost 30,000 signatures. On 17 February it was announced that the library and archive of the Wallace Collection would remain open to the public following an internal consultation, although Bray warned that a difficult road lies ahead for the institution as it counts the cost of the pandemic.