Letter: Museum service is of global importance and must be saved

While the announcement of the opening of a dialogue with the Friends and other interested parties and a six-month delay in implementation of one of the three redundancies at the Resource Centre is welcome, it is to be hoped it is not a tactic aimed at reducing opposition to the cuts.

It is evident that councillors and their advisers have no appreciation of the importance of the Ludlow collections, particularly the geology collection, or of the need for curatorial and support staff.

For your information, councillors, curating a museum collection involves not only display but also active collection, conservation, cataloguing, research, documentation and interpretation and the use of the collections for educational purposes, as well as answering inquiries from the public and research scientists, identifying items and often fund-raising and publicity too.

For a geological collection of worldwide significance, which is what you have in Ludlow, the availability to research workers of the reference collection is critical.

Now the advice of a "visitor economy services manager" seems to be deciding the future of museum service. I would be very interested to know what museum expertise this manager has.

It seems probable that, as was predicted would happen, Ludlow is paying for the over budget development of Shrewsbury Museum and perhaps even for the disastrous visitor centre at Church Stretton, now sold off to a private company.

The whole course of my life was determined by early visits to Ludlow Museum.

If you destroy the museum, you are cutting local young people off from potentially life-changing experience. Remember, scientific collections, which he began to make and study when young, were the foundation of Charles Darwin's work.

Ludlow's life-blood is tourism and Ludlow Museum's collections are of worldwide importance.

Alan Cheese, Associate of the Museums Association, Market Rasen