Supervision of museums should be perceived
taking into account both specific regulations: addressed
directly to museums, particularly in the Act on Museums,
as well as general regulations assuming supervision
mechanisms in different respects, e.g., construction process
or HR. This complex perspective: systemic and normative,
is essential not only with respect to the supervision in
a narrow basic meaning of the term, associated in the
first place with an inspection of the supervised entity
and application of respective executive actions, e.g.,
undertaken in the form of administrative decisions, but
also the supervision in a broader perspective, understood
as a whole range of support provided to a museum,
including issuing recommendations, evaluations, and
opinions important for its operation.
In the context of ‘external’ supervision implemented by
appropriate organs and entities, the following are of basic
importance: the museum’s organiser (founder) supervision,
constituting one of the organiser’s basic statutory responsibilities,
as well as the supervision of the minister responsible
for culture and preservation of national heritage, with respect
to e.g., the preservation and care of historic monuments
and museum operations; additionally, it is the matter
of conservation supervision performed by Voivodeship
Conservators of Historic Monuments as organs specialized in
the preservation and care of historic monuments, the latter
constituting, e.g., museum collections.
As for the ‘internal’ supervision aspects, the role of museum
councils, obligatory in public museums (state ones or
organised by local governments), needs to be emphasized.
Their statutory responsibility is to e.g., supervise how museums
fulfil their responsibilities with respect to the collection
and the public, in particular how they fulfil the goals as
specified in Art.1 of the Act on Museums.
The questions of supervision are also important for
non-public museums (their founders) which in the event
of violating either the Act’s provisions or their own charter
have to be prepared that supervisory activities might
be applied to them, up to the ban on their further operations.
Museum network of Lviv region: territorial trends of progress
