Use It or Lose It There are 1 billion artefacts held by UK museums and galleries. However, about 800 million of them never see the light of day, and are stored in museum and gallery basements where they cannot be used and enjoyed by learners. Of course, many of these collections are fragile or sensitive and it is quite right that they should be held in museum stores where they should be properly cared for and researched by specialists. But many more could be enjoyed by the public if museums had the space and capacity to enable people to interact with more of what they hold. Use it or lose it proposes a number of ways in which some of the artefacts held by museums and galleries can be diffused into society and into people’s everyday lives: through schools, hotels, shops and living rooms, inspiring and engaging people and creating the capacity to collect modern stories about modern Britain. Some of the ways we could do this include: A national learning loans programme – sharing out some of the 800 million artefacts held by museums and galleries, taking heritage to the people rather than insisting they come to us.   A national volunteer programme – designed to train volunteers in the skills they need to work in museums thereby getting a volunteer workforce of some 50,000 back into learning.