Portal:Museums

The Museums Portal

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile

A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying and/or preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects. Many museums have exhibitions of these objects on public display, and some have private collections that are used by researchers and specialists. Museums host a much wider range of objects than a library, and usually focus on a specific theme, such as the arts, science, natural history or local history. Public museums that host exhibitions and interactive demonstrations are often tourist attractions, and many attract large numbers of visitors from outside their host country, with the most visited museums in the world attracting millions of visitors annually.

Since the establishment of the earliest known museum in ancient times, museums have been associated with academia and the preservation of rare items. Museums originated as private collections of interesting items, and not until much later did the emphasis on educating the public take root. (Full article...)

Selected museum

The old building with the new wing in 2013

Museum de Oude Wolden (Dutch pronunciation: [myˈzeːjʏm də ˌʔʌudə ˈʋɔldə(n)]; English: Museum The Old Wolds), abbreviated as MOW, is a regional museum in the village of Bellingwolde in the Netherlands. The museum focuses on art and history of the regions of Oldambt and Westerwolde in the east of the province of Groningen.

The museum opened on 10 August 1973. In the first decades, it primarily exhibited historical objects documenting everyday life. In the late 1990s, the museum started to exhibit artworks of artist collective De Ploeg and magic realist painter Lodewijk Bruckman. Since 2012, it has a permanent display of paintings by Bruckman and temporary exhibitions.

The museum is an independent foundation that is mainly funded by the municipality of Bellingwedde. From 2013 to 2016, the museum had around 4,700 visitors per year. It is one of the lesser-visited museums in Groningen. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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  Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, an archaeology and anthropology museum
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  The queen's chamber of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, the former residence of Marie Antoinette
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  Iron bed in torture room at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh
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  The Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
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  Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale
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  The Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, has the world's largest stained-glass ceiling, designed by Leonard French.
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  Entrance hall of the Vienna Technical Museum, one of the largest technology museums in Europe
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  Storage gallery of the Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, a museum of pre-Columbian art
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  Old Dutch display case in Branderszaal Lange Haven 97, Schiedam
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  Display cases in Altena Castle
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  Exhibit in Indonesia Museum, Jakarta, displaying the traditional costumes of Indonesian ethnic groups
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  Panoramic view of the library of the Guimet Museum, Paris, an art museum specialising in Asian art
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  Floating Heads by Sophie Cave (2006), installed in the East Court of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
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  The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, showing some of its collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities
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  An early 18th-century German Schrank with a traditional display of corals, from the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin
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  The Industrial Gallery, housed in the original part of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, designed by Yeoville Thomason and opened in 1885
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  The Dinosaur Hall of the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin, showing the skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, among the largest mounted skeletons in the world
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  The Galerie des Glaces of the Palace of Versailles
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  Antique cuckoo clocks displayed at Cuckooland Museum, Tabley, an example of a specialised museum
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  The South Hall of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia, an aerospace museum, showing the Enola Gay bomber and other aeroplanes
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  A museum in Verkhniye Mandrogi, Leningrad Oblast, specialising in vodka
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  Triangular prism-shaped display cases in the Red Dot Design Museum, Essen

Selected general article

Visual storage at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Collection maintenance is an area of collections management that consists of the day-to-day hands on care of collections and cultural heritage. The primary goal of collections maintenance or preventive conservation is to prevent further decay of cultural heritage by ensuring proper storage and upkeep including performing regular housekeeping of the spaces and objects and monitoring and controlling storage and gallery environments. Collections maintenance is part of the risk management field of collections management. The professionals most involved with collections maintenance include collection managers, registrars, and archivists, depending on the size and scope of the institution. Collections maintenance takes place in two primary areas of the museum: storage areas and display areas.

Collection maintenance and its tasks all work as a means to continually observe the condition of collections and ensure they are properly maintained and cared for. Because museums and repositories are stewards of cultural property in the public trust, they have a "responsibility to provide reasonable care for the objects entrusted" to them. Museum's collections maintenance tasks can also involve assessing and implementing strategies to improve storage areas and containers while continuously monitoring environmental conditions that may affect objects. (Full article...)

Did you know...

• ... that One Night with Regine was a concert in support of the child-welfare program Bantay Bata, staged on the steps of the entrance façade of the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila?
• ... that illustrator Abigail Larson once designed a wine-bottle label for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum?
• ... that conservator Carolyn Price Horton helped to direct a "Mud Angel army" that rescued books after the Arno flooded museums and libraries in Florence, Italy, in 1966?
• ... that the Al Qarara Cultural Museum, housed in a former grain silo, contained 6000 years of history?
• ... that the Deutsches Romantik-Museum in Frankfurt, the only museum dedicated to the entire era of German Romanticism, looks like three houses and features blue elements?
• ... that the Seabury Tredwell House, now a museum, is Manhattan's only remaining 19th-century house with its original furnishings?

Get involved

For editor resources and to collaborate with other editors on improving Wikipedia's Museums-related articles, see WikiProject Museums.

Selected exterior image

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  Aerial view of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel's Holocaust memorial; the museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, opened in 2005 and tells the personal stories of ninety Holocaust victims and survivors
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  The State Historical Museum, Moscow
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  Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
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  The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
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  Small cloister of the charterhouse of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, built on the site of the Baths of Diocletian; part of the National Roman Museum of Rome
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  National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
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  The Museum Island, Berlin
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  The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
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  The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
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  Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
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  The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
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  A maritime museum located in the village of Bolungarvík, Vestfirðir, Iceland, showing a 19th-century fishing base with a typical boat of the period and associated industrial buildings: an example of a very small museum
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  The British Museum, London
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  The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
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  The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.
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  The Lower Castle of Ambras Castle, Innsbruck, one of the earliest buildings constructed specifically for use as a museum; it remains a museum displaying its original collections
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  São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, a 1968 concrete-and-glass structure designed by Lina Bo Bardi, considered a landmark of the city and a major example of modern Brazilian architecture
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  Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
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  The Dalí Theatre and Museum, commemorating Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, Catalonia, has a geodesic dome and is decorated with giant eggs.
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  The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
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  Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
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  The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997
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  Paifang or arched entrance of the Northern Branch of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, whose collection covers 8,000 years of the history of Chinese art
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  The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
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  The Louvre, Paris, showing the glass-and-metal Pyramid, designed by I. M. Pei to act as the museum's main entrance, and completed in 1989
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  Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
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  The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
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  Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum

Selected type of museum

A design museum is a museum with a focus on product, industrial, graphic, fashion and architectural design. Many design museums were founded as museums for applied arts or decorative arts and started only in the late 20th century to collect design.

The first museum of this kind was the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In Germany the first museum of decorative arts was the Deutsches-Gewerbe-Museum zu Berlin (now Kunstgewerbemuseum), founded in 1868 in Berlin. (Full article...)

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