Luo, together with Artron.net, one of the largest art and art trading websites in China, is working on a white paper titled The Ecology of China’s Private Museums. The paper will be released by the end of November, when a summit of private galleries and an art fair of works drawn from their collections, will be held by China Collectors’ Club in Shanghai.

"The main problems include lack of funding, academic help and public support," Luo said. "And some museums had questionable orientation in the first place."

Central and local governments are aware of the troubles facing private museums and are taking action to rectify the situation.

In Shanghai this year, 10 million yuan ($1.57 million) will be poured into the city’s 16 private museums that are not associated with any other enterprise.

"The upper limit for each museum is around 400,000 yuan this year," said Li Jing, a staff member from the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage’s museum department.

Li said 11 of those 16 private museums were sponsored by the city’s administration of cultural heritage last year and shared funds of 10 million yuan between them.

In addition to financial aid, the State-owned Shanghai Museum also paired up with Liuli China Museum, which specializes in glass art, to share some of its expertise.

The Shanghai Museum tested the private museum’s temperature, humidity and formaldehyde concentration in an effort to prevent the glass from corroding.

"Our lab conducted a four-month assessment last year on the glass museum’s storeroom and exhibition hall, and we also sent experts to appraise their 262 exhibits," said Chen Kelun, deputy director of the Shanghai Museum.

Tang Sifu, curator of Liuli China Museum, said almost all of the staff members at her museum were not professionally trained or from an academic museum background, and the expertise offered by the Shanghai Museum turned her museum "from disordered to systematic".

State-owned museums in Sichuan and Shanxi provinces also paired up with local private museums last year to help them upgrade the exhibition quality and services. The help was greatly appreciated by private museum curators.

"It’s extremely tough for private museums to improve from a venue packed with personal collections to an educational public space — we don’t have resources, we don’t have professional backgrounds, we simply don’t know where to go," said Wang Dongli, curator of Liaoning’s Defu Museum, a private museum dedicated to cultural heritage from the New Stone Age.

"The expertise from those 30- or 40-year-old public museums would be highly appreciated."

Zhang Kun contributed to this story.

shiyingying@chinadaily.com.cn