Sir — The plan to ‘save’ the Museum of Oxford (Report, January 22) was promoted with admirable motives by the Oxford Civic Society; but so far from rescuing the museum will condemn it to further decline.

The staff figures say it all. The full-time curator and manager are to be replaced by one person doing both jobs.

Instead of four part-time museum assistants, two weekend assistants, the full-time education officer and education assistant, the museum will have just two part-time assistants and two part-time education officers.

On any one day, it is intended that there should be two volunteers working alongside the paid staff. They will be drawn from a bank of up to 20 volunteers working as and when available.

Not only will experienced and professionally qualified personnel be lost, but the staff, paid and unpaid, will be balkanised. Apart from the single full-time head, few if any of the staff will be in the museum on successive days, or perhaps even successive weeks.

History is about continuity, a commodity that will be in desperately short supply in the future Museum of Oxford.

We are told that savings of about £90,000 out of a total expenditure of some £200,000 per annum are to be achieved, not only through the reduced salary bill but by increasing sales in the museum shop and by obtaining sponsorship for the galleries. The new manager-cum-curator is obviously going to have to spend much, perhaps most, of his or her time raising money and less on the care of the museum and its displays, which are already showing sad signs of decades of under-investment. Is £200,000 a year really more than a world-class city can spend on the story of its heritage?

Chris Hall, Chairman, Oxfordshire Local History Association, Henley-on-Thames