Il ruolo dei Musei Universitari per la Terza Missione e l’impatto sociale

University Museums can become an effective support for what ANVUR, Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes of MIUR, defined, already in 2013, as the Third Mission in the Research Quality Assessment (VQR) 2004-2010: “all the activities by which Universities interact directly with the society”. This important acknowledgement of the special role that University Museums can play in a rapidly changing society has however been hardly evaluable, not only because of the approximate data collected and examined in the first Report 2013 but also because of the limited and incomplete data collected in the Report 2011-2014. With the indicators identified in the 2015 Evaluation Manual and with the new Guidelines for the compilation of the Single Annual Report on the Third Mission and Social Impact, published in November 2018 for the data relating to the years 2015, 2016 and 2017, the greater number of indicators, activities and results could give more data than the ones collected basing on the Manual 2015. But we don’t know how these data will be complete, that’s because also in this survey, as in the previous one, it wasn’t clear which University Museums will have to be evaluated; evaluation that, also in the Report 2018 has to be done (as in the Manual 2015) only for museum Centres defined as “museum structures of which the University has direct ownership or management. The management presupposes a formal act, as an agreement between the museum and the University. A museum Centre can include more museum sites”.