The Earth Sciences Review: Twenty Years On. more

THE EARTH SCIENCES REVIEW: TWENTY YEARS ON by Jeff Liston Liston, J., 2011. The Earth Sciences Review: Twenty Years On. The Geological Curator 9 (6): 363 - 369. The current round of cuts resulting from the global financial crisis once again places museum collections in a vulnerable position in terms of resource allocations from funders national, regional and private. Often, cuts in institutional funding are proposed in the context of being designed to reshape an organisation for a more streamlined role, better designed to meet the challenges of the future. But however well museums are redesigned, they rarely escape being viewed as legitimate targets for funding cuts whenever a new round of belt-tightening comes up. The inherent implication of the language of institutional reshaping is that a certain amount of protection, if not immunity, will be conferred on the museum come the next round - but that rarely happens. This is true from all ranges of funding sources: it is simply hard in political terms for funders to justify resources going to cultural preservation instead of hospitals or nursery education. Within museums, geological collections traditionally have a particularly hard time in terms of funding and justifying their existence. Whereas artworks, archaeological, historical or ethnographic objects appear to have an intuitively obvious value to external assessors, arguing the case for natural science in general, and geology in particular, has always been an uphill struggle. So it is worth reflecting on an unusual manifestation of this phenomenon in the late 1980s, when cuts in funding actually led to an increase in funding for geological museum collections.....at least for some. glzjl@bristol.ac.uk, School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1RJ, England. and Natural Sciences Department, National Museums Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh,EH1 1JF, SCOTLAND. Received 23 November 2011. Background - University Funding One of the hallmarks of the 1980s Conservative Government's approach to Higher Education (as well as other sectors), was the introduction of market forces and competition. The University Grants 1 Committee 1 gave way to the Universities' Funding Council, with the emphasis being shifted to a limited quantity of money that was to be competed for by the relevant institutions, in more direct contest than before. There were winners, and losers. The University Grants Committee (UGC) was an advisory committee of the British Government that advised on the distribution of grant funding amongst the British universities. The creation of the UGC was first proposed in 1904 in the report of a committee chaired by Lord Haldane, but only came into being after the First World War, in order to address a need for a mechanism to channel funds to universities, which had suffered from neglect in funding during this period of conflict. The UGC's role at this time was to examine the financial needs of the universities and to advise on grants, but it did not have a remit to plan for the development of universities. This situation changed after the Second World War, when the 1946 Barlow Report recommended that the UGC take on a planning role for the university sector, to ensure that universities were adequate for national needs during post-war reconstruction. This was also in the wake of the 1944 Education Act, which had aimed to increase the number of school leavers qualified to enter higher education, thus requiring a period of expansion for the universities that needed to be planned by the UGC. During the postwar years the UGC continued to have a strategic role in the development of the university sector, acting as a buffer between government and the interests of the universities. In 1964 responsibility for the UGC was transferred from the Treasury to the newly constituted Department of Education and Science. The UGC was wound up on 1 April 1989 by the 1988 Education Reform Act, with its powers transferred to a new body, the Universities Funding Council. This was less of a 'buffer' between government and the needs of universities, than a body that reported directly to the Westminster Parliament, distributing central government's funds to universities for the provision of education and the undertaking of research. Critically, there was a shift in emphasis to a limited quantity of money that was to be competed for by the relevant institutions, in more direct contest than before. The UFC in turn was wound up a mere 3 years later by the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, which replaced its function with three regional bodies: today, these are the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE, www.hefce.ac.uk/research/initiats/museum , the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council (SFC, www.sfc.ac.uk - replaced the SFEFC Scottish Further Education Funding Council and SHEFC, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council in October 2005). 363 Similarly, the Earth Sciences Review was conducted by the UGC, as the first of three subject areas in the Physical Sciences to be considered for reorganisation: smaller than both Chemistry and Physics, Earth Sciences was seen as a suitable 'guinea pig' to test the process with. Announced on 27/10/1986 with the sending of the UGC Chairman's consultative letter (UGC circular letter 19/86, para 1.2 of Oxburgh 1987) to all 31 of the Vice-Chancellors and Principals, inviting their comments on the future organisation of Earth Science teaching and research. In addition, responses were invited from a variety of interested organisations, from professional bodies to government departments and funding councils. Amongst almost one hundred responses, the Geological Curators' Group (noted at the 17/3/1987 Earth Sciences Review Committee meeting, and in Appendix A of Oxburgh 1987) underlined that collections were a basic resource for Teaching and Research, that needed to be safeguarded in ANY reorganisation, regardless of what form it took). Partly as a result of this representation, the first report of the Earth Sciences Review under the chairmanship of ER Oxburgh (Professor of Mineralogy and Petrology, University of Cambridge) 'Strengthening University Earth Sciences', published on 5th May 1987, featured a section on Museums and Collections (paras 6.40-6.42, Oxburgh 1987). Within this, it drew particular attention to the importance of collections for four key functions of a university: for teaching, as sources of research material, as repositories of international reference material, and for public display. It thus specifically recommended that the special costs of curating collections that were internationally important had to be taken into account and provided for in any prospective reorganisation. In November 1987, the Earth Sciences Review issued a departmental questionnaire (see Appendix 3, O'Hara 1989) for each earth science department to submit data on academic staff, buildings, publications, courses taught etc etc (O'Hara 1989). Within that questionnaire was Form 8, a series of questions on Museums and Collections. These were mostly predictable questions about collection size, numbers of specimens of special status (type, figured or cited) or historical importance, use of the collections, how fully catalogued they were, numbers of designated staff and what degree of public access there was per annum. These questions led to an unusually cutthroat scenario, with institutions producing figures for the size of the collections they cared for as a way of estimating the significance of the work that they did. Ironically, this sometimes meant that the smaller collections did not do so well, as their material could be very accurately quantified, and the exact size of the larger collections were estimated in traditional (often slightly exaggerated) museum fashion. This became important, as in some cases those figures were to be used to justify the allocation of new long-term recurrent resources to institutions, to cover newly-created ongoing curatorial posts. At the end of 1987, the Earth Sciences Review charged Sir Alwyn Williams (at the time, Principal of the University of Glasgow) to chair a Museums and Collections Committee, to ensure that these collections were taken into account in the face of the imminent reorganisation of Earth Sciences, and that appropriate recommendations be made for the future, with particular reference for the ongoing curation of international reference material, including the relocation of collections, where necessary (para 3.87, O'Hara 1989). At their second meeting (19th May 1988), this Committee finalised their report for the Earth Science Review's June 1988 meeting, which in turn passed it to a further group chaired by I. G. Gass (Professor, Earth Sciences, Open University) to finalise recommendations (para 3.88, O'Hara 1989). The most important of the Williams Committee's proposals was the designation of five university museums - Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow - with type collections of national importance as major collection centres, which would ultimately hold type figured and cited specimens, in conjunction with national and selected local authority museums (para 3.90, O'Hara 1989). This designation required special funding, in order to secure adequate care for the existing collections of these museums, as well as those of type and other material to be transferred from other universities. The paramount criteria were the provision of adequate long-term care, curation, housing and conservation. The Williams Report also recommended that any redistribution of collections from departments that were not one of the five collection centres, should be decided on by those individual departments, taking advice, where necessary, from the Geological Curators' Group (para 4.11, Appendix 4, O'Hara 1989). The transferral of collections was a very real possibility - because although this article is focussed on the funding gained by some institutions, the Earth Sciences Review was fundamentally a move to reduce expenditure for the government on earth sciences (Anonymous 1988), and that meant closing departments, and the salient jobs being redeployed or simply axed. Inevitably, this provoked criticism, one letter to The Independent (Moorbath, 14/11/1989, just prior to the release of the final report and see also 364 Skinner 1989b) describing the Earth Sciences Review as an "over-heated and exaggerated….socalled rationalisation process". Perhaps most controversial of all was the axing of Hull University's Earth Sciences Department. Significant scientifically important collection material was at risk, and needed to be rehoused: there was a need for provision of resources to ensure adequate care of and access to specimens in the future, as well as the redeployment of staff- in this case Derek Siveter, who was transferred in a curatorial role to Oxford University. Such redeployment did not perhaps turn out to be the gift it might appear to individuals involved. For Derek Siveter, for example, having to move from Hull to Oxford, the relocation expenses were only designed to pay for removal vans, and certainly did not take into account the huge financial costs of having to move from a 3 bedroom house in the Hull area to the inflated property market of Oxford, at more than twice the price for an equivalent property (Siveter pers. comm.). Scotland) and MG Bassett (Keeper, Department of Geology, National Museum of Wales) were appointed to assess bids for resources, both recurrent and non-recurrent, submitted by the collection centres (paras 3.96 and 3.100, O'Hara 1989). It is important to note that the posts to be created were not temporary posts to process or facilitate the incorporation of those collections on a short term basis, but were recognised as ongoing permanent (or, to use the jargon of today, 'non-time-limited') contracts. In this respect, and as one of the largest beneficiaries UK-wide from the Earth Sciences Review process, the experience of the Hunterian Museum serves as an interesting example of an institution that benefited at the time, in terms of reviewing how it has met this challenge of new collections and new resources over the past twenty years, armed with the huge windfall that the Earth Sciences Review provided for it. Initially, it might come as a surprise to some that a Scottish university was such a significant beneficiary. However, the 1986 Miles Committee Report to the Museums and Galleries Commission noted (in para 4.3, page 31, Chapter 4, Miles 1986) that Scottish universities - in particular Edinburgh and Glasgow - had a relatively greater number (and higher quality) of museum collections than elsewhere in the UK. With the significance of the material established, it is also interesting to note a further observation of the Miles Committee: "we were left with the impression that many university collections are curated and maintained by accident" (in para 4.3, page 32, Chapter 4, Miles 1986). In the context of this observation, it is perhaps unsurprising that Glasgow saw the most posts created as a result of the Earth Sciences Review. Ongoing Recurrent Funding for Designated Collection Centres In December 1989, the Earth Sciences Review's second (and final) report 'Building for Success in the Earth Sciences' (O'Hara 1989) was published. Given that it had been agreed that the collection centres would receive further funding in order to care appropriately for the incoming collections as well as their own, in order to provide "adequate long-term care, curation, housing and conservation" (para 3.iv, UFC circular letter LF1404A, Skinner 1989a) for their own and any transferred material, posts would need to be created, to take on board the responsibility of the ongoing collections care that came with receiving the collections. In order to assess the degree to which this would be required, a Curators' Steering Committee was established, on which all the newly-designated collection centres were represented: chaired by WJ Kennedy (Oxford), it consisted of David Price (Cambridge, later replaced by David Norman), Graham Durant (Glasgow), John Nudds (Manchester) & Peter Lawrence (Birmingham, later replaced by Paul Smith), plus Robin Cocks of the British Museum (Natural History) (now the Natural History Museum London) 2 (Appendix 1, O'Hara 1989). Two independent assessors, WD Ian Rolfe (former Deputy Director of the Hunterian Museum, at the time Keeper of Geology, Royal Museum of 2 Assessing the Required Ongoing Resources The starting point for the Curators' Steering Committee in terms of the number of curators required per collection, was the metric given in the Museums and Collections Committee's final report (para 4.2, Appendix 4, O'Hara 1989), that for geological collections of such international importance there should be a curator for every 200,000 geological specimens, and one geological conservator. The Assessors looked further into the question of comparators for benchmarks elsewhere in the sector, to During the two years of the committee, there were changes to this initial line-up: David Price died in post, so was replaced by David Norman for Cambridge. Peter Lawrence's position was similarly taken over by Paul Smith for Birmingham (Nudds pers. comm.). 365 see how this figure compared with elsewhere for staff:specimen resources. Naturally, this entailed looking at the staff resources for the Nationals, including the Natural History Museum (then the British Museum (Natural History)) in London. Although the latter was close to 1 staff member for every 120,000 specimens, and the Assessors noted that a figure of 1:100,000 was preferable, the National Museum of Wales and the National Museums of Scotland had a figure closer to 1 dedicated collection staff member to every 20,000 specimens (Bassett & Rolfe 1989). So, in using the figure of 1:200,000, the metric used by the Curators' Steering Committee Assessors to calculate the required number of geological curators for each of the university collections involved in the Earth Sciences Review, was far from generous when compared to the natural benchmarks within the sector. What did this mean in real terms for a given institution? Taking the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum as an example, the overall figures used were 200,000 rock specimens, 30,000 mineral specimens, half a million fossil specimens, and over 20,000 thinsections, with a further 12,000 type/figured/cited specimens - a total of over 760,000 specimens. This figure was then further enlarged by the planned addition of the collections from the universities of Dundee and Strathclyde geology departments, to a total of 907,000 specimens. At the time, there were only two geological curators in post 3, and the metric from the Earth Sciences Review as noted in the Assessors' Report (Bassett & Rolfe 1989) meant that two additional geological curators (and a geological conservator) were required to supplement the two pre-existing geological curators - the financial support for those ongoing recurrent costs being quantified at £76K (including overheads) in April 1991 (£111,773 equivalent in April 2011). The expectation in the Museums and Collections Committee's final report is clear - the posts already funded by the institution, will continue to be funded by the institution, as any fall-off in staff numbers would mean that a collection centre was automatically below minimum adequate cover to fulfil its designated role. Financial support for ongoing costs to bring staffing numbers up to the required level for minimum adequate cover was not the sole area that the five main collection centre institutions received financial support for. Money was also allocated on the basis of building works for adequate store provision, costs of collection movement from other institutions - however, all of these were non-recurrent, one-off payments from the UFC. Although the arrangements for funding were viewed to be adequate (as the figures were based on submissions from the collection centres concerned), concerns were already being expressed as early as 1992 as to whether the arrangements would prove to be sufficient in the longer term (Edwards 1992). Twenty years on from Implementation It is interesting to compare the staffing levels in 2011 to those levels from the time of the Review (Table 1). It is important to note a number of key definitions that apply to this table, as laid down in O'Hara 1989 and Bassett & Rolfe 1989, for the purposes of the creation of the newly-funded posts: 'Geological Conservator' is defined as a full-time member of staff, formally trained in conservation, working solely on the geological collections. This role was often defined by institutions as that of a technician. In 2011, only the Sedgwick have retained their geological conservator, although Birmingham's current curator has conservation experience and their former geological conservator retains an advisory role with the Lapworth Museum. 'Geological Curator' is defined as a permanent full-time member of staff employed as a curator and solely working on the geological collections, without responsibility for other collections or other duties such as teaching. Local variations in job nomenclature meant that posts were not always give the correct title of geological curator, despite that being the job done. As such, it is worth noting that the term 'curator' at the Sedgwick Museum is a misnomer, as they have traditionally been advisory roles in addition to the responsibilities of the individual's academic department. In this case, the job of geological curator (in the sense defined above) is actually carried out by the collection managers and assistants 4. The evident fall-off in professional geological posts in the collection centres raises the question as to where the recurrently-funded positions have gone. 3 The picture of precisely what the Hunterian had as curatorial staff cover at this time is slightly muddied by the fact that both of the geological curators had 25% of their time allocated by contract to teaching for the University of Glasgow's geology department. So effectively this meant only 1.5 full time equivalent geological curators were in post at this time, instead of 2. This appears to be one of the reasons why the Bid Assessors Report (para 3.6, Bassett & Rolfe 1989) specified that "Staff should be appointed on Other Related" [i.e. not Academic] "scales and assigned specifically to curatorial work, with carefully specified and limited teaching and research roles, if any." 366 Institution Collection Centre Non-recurrent (one-off payments for building, storage, collection Staffing level prior to transfer etc.) 1991 Recurrent Staff Funding Received Designated Geological Collection Posts in 1991 following funding release (Bassett & Rolfe 1989) Posts in 2011 Cambridge £468K 1 geological curator + 4 geological technicians 3 (equivalent) £101K (to bring staff 2 geological curators + geological curators + 1 geological to 5 geol curators + 1 7 geological conservator geol conservator) technicians Glasgow £313K £76K (to bring staff to 3.5 geological curators + 2 geological 1.5 geological curators + 4 geol curators + 1 2 geological technicians 1 geological technician geol conservator) curators £40K (to bring staff to 3.4 geological curators 3 geol curators + 1 + 2.2 geological 2 assistant geol conservator) technicians geological curators £64K (to bring staff to 2 geol curators + 1 2 geological curators + geol conservator) 1 geological technician 1 geological curator Oxford £447K 2 geological curators Manchester £198K 0 geological curators Birmingham £79K £24K (to bring staff to 1 geological curator + 1 geol curators + 1 2 geological technicians 2 geological technicians geol conservator) 1 geological curator Table 1. Fundamentally, are the collection centres still receiving the recurrent funds that were intended to come with their designated responsibilities? Although the figures disbursed by the different funding councils for the use of the collection centres over the twenty years are - in principle - a matter of public record in their annual reports and grant letters, in practice, the perpetual reconstitution of funding councils since the end of the UFC in 1992 has not aided clarity. In particular, the move to have HEFCE's Museums and Galleries Fund managed externally by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, then from 2005-2010 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has added a layer of opacity to attempts to discern the funding trail for earth sciences in university museums. A later change, with the Funding Councils electing to cease separating the ESR recurrent component from the total block grant as a discrete and distinct element also does not help, but in spite of this, it does not appear that the figures fell suddenly and drastically at any point as the consequence of some unannounced and uncommunicated decision to prematurely curtail the Earth Sciences Review fund- ing stream. (The recent decision to inexplicably terminate the Sedgwick Museum's funding, and apparently transfer it wholesale to the Scott Polar Research Institute's Polar Museum, though raising extremely serious questions about central support for designated collection centres, is very important and requires urgent action, but is a separate issue to the pattern dealt with in this paper.) As such, the question naturally arises as to whether the redirection of monies is a decision being made not at funding council level, but within the recipient institutions themselves either within the universities' management, or within the individual museum department, as they decide not to replace geological posts that they are receiving recurrent funding for. The situation currently facing Oxford with Derek Siveter's retirement at the end of September, is thus a typical one: the OUMNH is left with only two assistant curators and two support staff to be responsible as permanent staff for the curation and conservation of the entire collection, with no indication as yet as to when (or if) Derek's post, and a frozen support post which should have been filled since July, will be filled. 4 It is also worth noting, in this qualitative sense, that the recommendation contained in the Bid Assessors' Report (para 3.7, Bassett & Rolfe 1989) that applicants for ESR-funded curatorial posts "should be required to hold the Museums Diploma" was regularly ignored. In many cases, the requirement of a post-graduate qualification for a post was seen as making the post too expensive by at least some of the institutions, although a museum qualification was often cited in job adverts as 'desirable, but not essential'. 367 How could such a misalignment or disjunction have come to pass between the conclusions of a Government review, and real collection posts still in existence? As already noted, the continued reinvention of funding bodies is unlikely to have helped. It also has to be acknowledged that the problem may also in part be due to 'revolving door' management policies at institutions: at a time when many museums lurch from one short-term infrastructure project to the next (either a wholesale collections move, or large scale display work - thus continually disrupting their core curation, rather than consolidating it or eliminating backlogs), it is easy to see how such funding might have been misinterpreted by incoming managers as being in the same light as these shortterm tasks… And once initially made, it would be somewhat difficult for subsequent managers not to repeat the mistake of failing to reappoint lost posts, if unaware that the institution was still receiving dedicated funding for those positions. Such a shift might also be reinforced by other 'competing' disciplines within a university museum, that fail to understand the scale of the collections issues involved with geological material: two former directors of university museum collection centres have put it to me directly that the geology collections were seen by other curators in their department as 'oversubscribed' with curators, as many other collections (in the sense of discipline areas) had no such dedicated staff. Such an opinion seems to ignore the fact that in contrast with other museum disciplines, the earth sciences had undergone a rigorous Government-driven review, which had assessed what the minimum adequate level for collection care was at each institution - not something to be lightly second-guessed by departmental managers 5. Again, the created posts were not an arbitrary short-term move, but were ongoing dedicated positions, designed to cope with the increased level of work resulting from the collection centres receiving the geological collections of closed university departments, in addition to dealing with already acquired material, and commensurate recurrent core funding was received on that basis. The departments that the supplementary material came from were then closed as an outcome of that process - and the collection centres were allocated recurrent funding to look after their collections in their stead in perpetuity. No other museum discipline has been subjected to such rigorous benchmarking. The mechanics of such a shift in curatorial balance within a university museum can transpire in many ways. Taking the Hunterian again as an example: within ten years of the Earth Sciences Review funding being allocated, the two geological curators, that had originally been in post when the two additional ones were taken on with Earth Science Review money, left the Hunterian (one retiring, the other moving job to Australia). Critically, their posts were not replaced, thus allowing the numbers of curators to drop below the necessary minimum quota to maintain the collections, from four to two, as some form of 'levelling' across the department, to give some imagined parity with other sections. Geological curators 3 and 4 became merely geological curators 1 and 2 - with double the workload. And this nonreplacement of ESR-created posts is not restricted to Glasgow. It is small wonder that, with the non-replacement of such geological curator posts at designated collection centres, that any remaining collection staff have struggled to cope with the logistical implications of those collections: evidence of the resulting struggle with the non-replacement of such posts can be found across the collection centres. Not only is it observable in the scale of the ongoing backlog of uncatalogued specimens in the pre-Earth Sciences Review collections, but also in the failure to cope with the many thousands of specimens that have subsequently arrived at the collection centres. By the original metric, which still forms the basis of the funding that the five collection centres' parent institutions still receive today, all of those collection centres are operating at staffing levels that (as per the Earth Sciences Review) fail to provide the necessary minimum collection cover for their geological material, and this conclusion is supported by the anecdotes of overdue collection work, including (from one curator) tales of a collection of sulphides that formed part of material from one of the closed departments, that were subsequently left in inappropriately damp conditions for the best part of two decades, owing to lack of time to process the material (pers. comm.. S. Perry). And what of the situation at Oxford, with Derek Siveter retiring this year? Will his post be maintained, as was intended in the decisions of the ESR? The future, as a writer once remarked, is uncertain, even if the past is always clear. 5 Such an opinion also seems to largely ignore the fact that by volume, by weight, by number the natural sciences (and geology in particular) will always vastly outweigh the other collections of most multidisciplinary institutional repositories. Regardless of opinions on its subjective value, there is a very substantial demand in terms of resources required to manage material of this kind. 368 So what is the lesson from history here? Plenty of geological collections are in crisis these days, with staff reducing further and further as natural wastage is allowed to ease strain on departmental budgets, or to redeploy staff resources to sections seen as 'more worthy'. What is interesting here is what happens, even when institutions supposedly come out ahead of the game in terms of funding, and how even then it does not mean any long-term security for the collections involved whatsoever. Did the Earth Sciences Review get it wrong - were institutions being provided with more staff than required to curate their collections to a minimum adequate level? Apparently not, given the aforementioned ongoing backlogs, and failures to get to grips with the material originally received as part of the Earth Sciences Review by the 'successful' bidding institutions. Given the undertakings on processing backlogs of material that were made when institutions achieved accreditation, the loss of staff will inevitably impact on the feasibility of meeting those promised targets, thus risking their accredited status, with consequent exclusion from many major funding sources. But this is a clear indication - if any were needed - that no matter what agreements may be reached to look after collections as they are being handed over, no matter what arrangements are made for staff to be employed 'in perpetuity' to look after them....there are absolutely no guarantees. Funders can dictate and change goalposts, no matter what government groups made the original decision, or what bequest terms were set down for the care of a collection. No matter what conditions are made, what safeguards are laid down, they can all be forgotten with a simple change of management (which can take place these days quite easily over a mere five years) - and any collection can become a collection in crisis. (former Director of Sedgwick Museum, and Steering Committee representative for the University of Cambridge), John Nudds (formerly Steering Committee representative for Manchester University), Paul Smith (current Director of the Lapworth Museum, formerly Steering Committee representative for Birmingham University). Thanks also go to the staff at Kew National Archives; Jude Henderson, Sandhya Kapitan and Fiona Bates of the SFC; Vicky Jones at HEFCE for assistance in the quest for archival records; and Ken McNamara, Dan Pemberton, David Gelsthorpe, Monica Price, Cindy Howells, Tom Sharpe and Keith Ingham for helpful discussion. References Anonymous (1988) Oxburgh: almost there? In News & Comment: Home and general, Geology Today, 4(3):78, Blackwell: Geological Society of London. Bassett, M. G. & Rolfe, W. D. I. (1989) Assessment of Bids for UFC Funding, 23/5/1989. Edwards, D. (1992) A policy for university museums and collections. In News & Comment: Home and general, Geology Today, 8(2):50-51, Blackwell: Geological Society of London. Faragher, R. A. (1989) UGC Purchasing Adviser's Earth Sciences Report (November 1989). National Archives Kew reference UGC 6/74+30/11 LF3010B Miles, H. (1986) Museums in Scotland : report by a working party, London: HMSO. Moorbath, S. (1989) Letter to The Independent 14/11/1989 O'Hara, M. J. (1989) Building for Success in the Earth Sciences December 1989 HMSO (Report 2 of the Earth Sciences Review, December 1989), University Grants Committee, London: HMSO. National Archives Kew reference UGC 6/86 Oxburgh, E. R. (1987) Strengthening University Earth Sciences (Report 1 of the Earth Sciences Review, May 1987), University Grants Committee, London: HMSO. National Archives Kew reference UGC 6/35 Skinner, J. M. (1989a) UFC circular letter LF1404A,18/4/1989. Skinner, J. M. (1989b) Letter to The Independent responding to Moorbath's letter 30/11/1989 Acknowledgements This review would not have been possible without the enthusiastic assistance of many key figures involved with the Earth Sciences Review. It is therefore with immense gratitude that I extend my sincere thanks to Jim Kennedy (Chair of Curators' Steering Committee, ESR), WD Ian Rolfe & MG Bassett (Independent Assessors of UFC Funding Bids related to ESR), Derek Siveter (moved from Hull to Oxford as part of the ESR redeployment of staff following that departmental closure), David Norman 369