How can small New Zealand museums provide access to and manage their collections with limited resources? : a study of small museums in New Zealand

Abstract

Museums in New Zealand have a 'social contract' with their communities to collect, preserve and display the cultural heritage of that region. That said, small regional museums are in a position of having to undertake significant amounts of revenue generation to supplement their core funding, which is usually very small, and often in the form of subsidies on rental and lease for buildings. Other resources are also needed to enable the museums to be able to continue to operate. The concept of revenue generation is a relatively new one for the New Zealand not-for-profit sector, including as it does the concepts normally associated with commercial business and entrepreneurialism. This research examines the ways that a small selection of museums in one region of New Zealand address these issues, and in doing so to compare their methods with a set of core entrepreneurial indicators to see if these approaches can be judged as entrepreneurial. The research results show that the small museums in this study show evidence of an entrepreneurial approach in three of four main indicators.