Designing orientation documentation for your museum: the scientific and cultural project
Any museum can formalize, in a guidance document, an inventory of its situation, then strategic axes to guide its actions in five years. For museums in France, this scientific and cultural project (PSC) is mandatory.
Today, most of the information on developing a CCS can be found in the museum developed by the Museums of France (2007) in download right.
The development of a scientific and cultural project is:
- mandatory in a number of regulated cases, in particular a museum project (construction or renovation), where access to State subsidies for the site is conditional on the existence of a PSC;
- highly recommended in most situations : justification for an acquisition or restoration, strategic choices for prioritising actions, museographic presentation or cultural programming, maintaining stability or increasing the number of staff assigned to the institution.
On each subject, the existence of a scientific and cultural project is an important asset for the institution:
- instrument of dialogue and negotiation, it offers more visibility to the community on which the museum depends: it is good for the material conditions (investment, operation, staff); it is good for the position of the institution in the institutional network (at community, regional and national level);
- it offers more visibility to scientific and professional partners and their networks; it is the ideal time to create or consolidate partnerships;
- it is a lever for the museum’s actions: acquisitions, restorations, recollection;
- it allows access to the subsidy of the Ministry of Culture and Communication: various works;
- it is a tool for the collective investment of staff in the good health of the institution, and is based on the adhesion of all.
The scientific and cultural project defines the main orientations and strategies of the museum. It analyses the interactions between the collections, the public, the environment and the museum building. It should reveal three elements:
- a balance sheet of the existing, as exhaustive as possible;
- the expression of a concept, of a museum identity, which makes a museum unique;
- the submission of a project for the period concerned (which must not exceed five or six years), with a few priority areas.
Contacts by department
Dordogne, Gironde, Landes, Lot-et-Garonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques: 05 57 95 02 09,
somatthieu.dussauge@culture.gouv.fr
Corrèze, Creuse, Haute-Vienne:
05 55 45 66 75, nicolas.bel@culture.gouv.fr
Charente, Charente-Maritime, Deux Sèvres, Vienne:
05 49 36 30 20, caroline.papin@culture.gouv.fr
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