A Dataset of Collections Dispersal following Museum Closures in the UK during 2000-2025

This repository contains data collected as part of the AHRC-funded Museum closure in the UK 2000-2025 research project, covering museum closure in the UK between 2000 and 2025 and the flows of objects away from those museums.The Principal Investigator is Prof Fiona Candlin (Birkbeck, University of London). The project was conducted at the Mapping Museums Lab (Birkbeck, University of London) and at the Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab (King's College London).Software and data used in the research project can be found on the project's GitHub repository.The dataset details the closures of 479 museums, recording the reasons why they closed, what happened to their collections, and the actors involved. Events, actors and reasons are typed according to taxonomies also included in the repository; the objects are typed using Wikidata items; and each museum is linked to its entry in the Mapping Museums database.A detailed analysis of this dataset was published in the following report:Candlin, Fiona and Ballatore, Andrea and Liebenrood, Mark and Poulovassilis, Alex and Wood, Peter and Wright, George and Golovteeva, M. and Bonett, H. (2025) Closed museums and their collections 2000-25. Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.Cite this dataset as:Mark Liebenrood, George A. Wright, Fiona Candlin, Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore, Peter T. Wood (2026) A Dataset of Collections Dispersal following Museum Closures in the UK during 2000–2025. Journal of Open Humanities Data.