Andrea Geddes Poole . Stewards of the Nation's Art: Contested Cultural Authority, 1890–1939 . Buffalo, N.Y. : University of Toronto Press . 2010 . Pp. xii, 304. $65.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is a study of early twentieth-century art museum boards in London: the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate Gallery. It provides a compelling example of the interdisciplinary value of museum studies and of the museum's importance as a place at which culture, history, and society intersect. The author argues that the boards were zones of conflict among four groups competing to define cultural stewardship: aristocratic amateurs whose authority flowed from their dynastic collections and whose self-image was one of public service, but who rarely donated; middle-class patrons who might collect with a view to donation but were less likely to be trustees; the state, more particularly the Treasury, whose interest was in parsimonious stewardship; and the middle-class activists who took a jaundiced view of the aristocrats who were prepared to export their old master paintings. At the heart of the book is a puzzle, the Treasury's Rosebery Minute (1894). In 1855, the National Gallery's director had been given the final word in matters of acquisition, conservation, and management. Forty years later, the Treasury Minute reduced directorial powers; directors were to be chief executives who influenced their boards' decisions. But these would be board decisions. Irreconcilable differences between directors and trustees were to be referred to the Treasury. Small wonder that in 1918 D. S. MacColl recalled how difficult things were during his time as keeper, that is chief officer, at the Tate. Merely tolerated by the trustees, he had no money to spend on pictures. It was harder, he quipped, for him to acquire a painting than it would have been to steal one from the collection.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".