The National Museum of the Royal Navy

With six sites across the country, The National Museum of the Royal Navy is comprised of galleries, displays, and exhibitions of famous ships, planes, and submarines and the stories of service people. 

In 2022, The National Museum of the Royal Navy commissioned Naomi Korn Associates to carry out a ‘health check’ of the organisation’s approach to copyright. This was essential and timely work as The National Museum of the Royal Navy prepared to launch its online collections portal. 

Naomi Korn Associates worked collaboratively with staff to produce comprehensive documentation covering all aspects of copyright from collections management and access to volunteer agreements and freelance contracts.  

This work provided the museum with a clear policy to manage Intellectual Property Rights, a more confident team able to deal with challenges, and an organisational approach to manage risk while widening access to the collections. It also supported a successful award of the The National Museum of the Royal Navy’s Place of Deposit status by The National Archives by demonstrating its commitment to comprehensive procedures to support appropriate collections management. 

“Our Naomi Korn Associates consultant worked flexibly and gave us confidence as individuals to tackle this issue and take ownership of it, enabling the collections team to go on to lead training wider colleagues on this new organisation wide approach”. Amy Adams, Collections Information and Access Manager, NMRN