A challenge and an opportunity for university museums in Italy: To be connected with all museums and cultural places

The Italian university museums have a big opportunity for increased visibility: the possibility to develop synergies with all Italian Museums and cultural realities through accreditation in the National Museum System, which will be soon activated by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. This new National Museum System will enable the establishment of connections between all types of museums in Italy, as well as between museums and state-owned cultural places, both public and private. The System is aimed to foster shared projects, particularly online and social media. The problem, for all museums and university museums in particular, is to become accredited into the National Museum System. Accreditation requires rigorous minimum quality standards in organization, collections, communication and relationships with the territory. These minimum quality standards have been established by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage after long discussions and an important contribution from the Code of Ethics for Museums of ICOM. Moreover, the accreditation system is based on self-evaluation models on an IT platform, where each museum can verify its minimum quality standards. A clear benefit of the process is the encouragement accreditation is likely to create, by identifying museums’ weak points and hopefully subsequent public investment in order to reach minimum requested standards. In this complex process involving all Italian museums, university museums could be assisted by the advice of an Observatory of Italian university museums, which will work in strict articulation with Ministry of Cultural Heritage. This Observatory could be an important development created by a CRUI (Conference of Italian University Rectors) project, approved and financed in 2018 by the Ministry of Education, University and Research. In this paper I will detail the accreditation process, the role of the Observatory and the challenges for university museums in Italy.