I have been interested by the comments on my post on Elizabeth Esteve-Coll which have inevitably made me think again about the issues surrounding her still highly controversial re-organisation of the V&A.

I notice that she is described on Wikipedia as a librarian and in retrospect I think she did bring some of her views as a librarian from the National Art Library to the wider collection of the V&A: that the core responsibility of the museum was not ‘scholarship’ in the abstract, but to look after and care for the collection, catalogue it digitally, and make it freely and widely available to the public. At the time, I remember the staff of the British Museum were very critical of this attitude, but in the light of what has happened at the British Museum more recently, this switch in resources to collections care was not only necessary but highly desirable.

She inspired fierce loyalty in a way which was non-hierarchical and indeed anti-hierarchical.