Museums win rare assets battle
Charities have won a long battle against proposals that could have forced them to spend millions of pounds valuing rare or unusual assets in order to declare them on their balance sheets. The Accounting Standards Board had said valuations for all “heritage assets” would need to be included on the balance sheets of the country’s charitable trusts and museums. However, after consultations with charities and auditors, the requirement has been dropped from the final version of the ASB’s Financial Reporting Standard 30: Heritage Assets. (David Ainsworth, Third Sector, 30 June 2009)
New DACS licence for museums and heritage organisations in the pipeline
As an institution or individual, digitising works for educational use can be a prohibitively expensive and time consuming process in terms of clearing rights. And what of works where the rights holder can’t be traced, so called orphan works? For the Museums and Heritage sector a solution may be on the horizon. Within the new licence proposed by DACS (Design and Artists Copyright Society), institutions within remit would be able to:
- Digitise analogue resources and provide access to digital copies in the manner specified
- Digitise large numbers of items
Key benefits of using the licence will be the ability to:
- Greatly reduce the administrative burden involved with tracing rights holders when digitising works
- Obtain legal certainty (indemnity) over copied works, even for orphan works and works from countries without a reciprocal copyright agreement.
(Taken from JISC Digital Media Blog, 9th July 2009)
http://tinyurl.com/mr7uqp
http://www.dacs.org.uk/
Jacobs urges MA members to make use of Gift Aid
Rebecca Jacobs, the MA’s museum development officer, is urging museums to make use of Gift Aid, as Government estimates failure to make proper use of the incentive is losing the sector in the region of £20m a year. At a meeting on Friday 29 May to discuss Gift Aid, representatives from the Association of Independent Museums, the National Museum Directors Conference and the Museums Association were told by officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that HM Treasury will not consider introducing any further tax breaks to encourage philanthropy until full use is made of the Gift Aid scheme. HM Treasury is currently carrying out research into Gift Aid with a view to announcing changes in the November pre-budget report, looking to simplify and improve it. Gift Aid will also be discussed at the Government’s summit on corporate giving and philanthropy in October.
http://www.museumsassociation.org/28112
