A new website - www.lost-arts.org - has been launched by a consortium of trade unions to monitor arts and cultural projects, jobs and organisations that are lost due to spending cuts.

The unions involved are Prospect, PCS, Equity, the Musicians' Union, Unite and Bectu, as the Writers Guild of Great Britain, the National Union of Journalists. Individuals will have the chance to report instances where public spending cuts are having a negative impact on the arts and cultural sector.

Prospect negotiator Dave Allen said: "We want to raise the profile of the cultural heritage sector and get out our concerns about the loss of collections and expertise. "We also want to highlight the detrimental effect on the wider public of a rise in pay per view museums."

It comes after the Museums Association (MA) published the initial findings of a survey exploring the impact of spending cuts on local authority museums. More than 60 responses have been received by the association, with 40 per cent admitting to reducing the number of paid staff by at least 10 per cent in the last year.

MA head of policy and communications Maurice Davies said: "The increasing proportion of volunteers and the apparent growing interest in trust status may mark a move towards the Big Society model for local authority museums." Details: www.lost-arts.org