Staff Memo :: Future Exhibition Policy

I have been putting some thought to strategy. I can’t simply abandon the future of the museum in my hunt for the Skin Armour. I have a responsibility.

And nobody else around here seems to have a clue or a shred of initiative.

Plus which I WANT MoD to become the world’s foremost, internationally-benchmarked, universal-best-practice, state-of-the-art collection facility for dust and associated matters. And that, in the end, is the most important thing.

There’s a couple of ways I could achieve this.

I could slowly build an audience over the years and months. I would have to incrementally build the collection through tactical purchases and loans from other institutions, lucky finds and sheer hard-grind nose-to-the-whetstone brain-breaking hard work. Build MoD an international profile, critical review and the acclaim of our peers and competitors. I would have to hustle and network and schmooze.

Or I could get smart.

Hmmmm, now which shall I choose?

So, I took a leaf from Musrum’s book.

This is, in fact the very leaf I took. A prime one from the programme of events organised to mark the return of Musrum to Intersol. More here >> here >>here >> and here >>

You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you? I truly despair of the education system.

Alright, I’ll give you some background.

“Legend has it that Musrum conceived of the plan for his stronghold during a fleeting excursion into the Iron Age.

The Iron Castle was cast as a single unit. The two gigantic halves of the mould are on show in the castle museum.*

The Museum may be found in the Eastern half of the mould.

Musrum cast two versions of the Castle: Version A, The Side Elevation; Version B, The Ground Plan. He was at home in both.” ***

So, as you know, Musrum was master of all he surveyed – but even he realised that there was much that he did not survey. It was then that he realised that the best method of beating the competition, was to incorporate it. To metaphorically ingest it.

What we today call the Borg Stratagem.**

Of course I intend to utilise this strategy with considerably more success, although arguably less scruples, than Musrum. I’m not going to invite, but rather seize and collect with neither fee nor favour. MoD will simply shelter our competitors under its aegis; a meta-museum or Wunderkammer of Wunderkammern. This way I don’t need to go to all the tro8uble and expense of building a collection – I can just exhibit other museums’.

I am currently preparing a hit-list and I shall commission a SWOT analysis for each organization on it That’ll give you useless bunch in Administration something productive to do for a change. I already have several ideas about priorities.

Of course at the very top of my list is Musrum’s eastern branch, the Museum of Sevastapol. Expect it to go on display very soon. And in the meantime, I will evaluate all suggestions for possible inclusions in the hit-list with the utmost seriousness.

Please deposit them in the space below.

* This, of course, was written before the Weedking incursion. In the confusion the museum was stolen and has never been seen again.

** Whilst I’ll be the first to allow that his reasoning was correct, his follow-through of inviting other castle-owners to exhibit them in his Museum was underpowered at best and, arguably, criminally negligent at worst. Of course, one or two went along with it, but most flatly refused and he eventually was forced to put his own mother on exhibition. Luckily, a connoisseur, who bartered two valuable wheels for her, bought her and took her home. By all reports, he became her favourite son.

*** Quoted, of course, from Thacker and Earnshaw’s ‘Musrum’ 1968