I have to say that when I was director of the Museum of London, we brought 35 smaller museums together into a group. We created a very close knit.... Government had funding available to bring in. You had to apply for this funding, but it was significant for a museum. As you can appreciate, two million British pounds goes a long way in a museum. They had that type of funding available, but you had to have a minimum four or five partners.
We created special interest groups around technology, around joint promotion. We started seeing how we could procure things together. Could we collapse various departments together? Even though some of us were urban museums, some were university museums, and some were local authority museums, it didn't matter when we came together.
I know that in South Africa, the law simply said, “These national museums that have never worked together will now be put into one hub,” and off you go.
Because of the size of the country, there's something about having to create clusters of museums where you can have centres of excellence. We don't have to have everything in the Royal BC Museum. We can push out conservation, for example, to Prince George or somewhere, where there may be a greater call for it, or there may be a greater call for our archives.
I think there's a different way of looking at our heritage that needs to happen.