Portal:Museums

This portal is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy.

Please discuss the matter at this page's entry on the Miscellany for deletion page.

You are welcome to edit this page, but please do not blank, merge, or move it, or remove this notice, while the discussion is in progress. For more information, see the Guide to deletion.

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

Introduction

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 type of museum

USS LST-325 as a mobile museum in La Crosse, Wisconsin

A mobile museum is a museum educational outreach program that bring the museum to the people rather than vice versa. Typically they can be in Recreational Vehicles (RVs) or trucks/trailers that drive to schools, libraries and rural events. Their business model is to use grant or donor support, as they goal is to make the museum exhibit accessible to underserved populations. Below are some examples of mobile museums. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that exhibits at Peale's Philadelphia Museum included the first nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon?
... that a teenage boy stole over US$300,000 worth of paintings from the Deshong Art Museum by simply taking them off the wall and sliding them through a window?
... that visitors to the Museum of Sexual Cultures can make offerings to a statue of Priapus?
... that one of the buildings that house the Safe House Museum was where Martin Luther King Jr. hid from the Ku Klux Klan on 21 March 1968, just weeks before he was assassinated?
... 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 Ashton Hawkins arranged for the construction of the West Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, to house the Temple of Dendur?

Get involved

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

Selected images

Image 1In museums, paintings, framed and unframed, are normally hung on sliding or fixed racking. (from Museum)
Image 2An honours board listing the directors of a museum in Auckland, New Zealand (from Museum)
Image 3Classic cars displayed at an automotive museum, which could be considered both a history and technology museum (from Museum)
Image 4Museum textile storage includes rolled storage racks, hanging wardrobe and garments shelving, and cabinets. (from Museum)
Image 5The Nantong Museum, the first Chinese-sponsored museum (from Museum)
Image 6Archive Processing rooms provide a space for archivists to arrange and describe archival materials to make them accessible to researchers. (from Museum)
Image 7Officials blamed a lack of funding for a 2018 fire at the National Museum of Brazil that destroyed over 90% of its contents (from Museum)
Image 8A curator and exhibit designer dressing a mannequin for an exhibit (from Museum)
Image 9Exhibit planning (from Museum)
Image 10Visitors examining fossils displayed at the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, Iran (from Museum)
Image 11The Louvre in 1853 (from Museum)
Image 12Collections storage for three-dimensional historic artifacts. (from Museum)
Image 13The old Ashmolean Museum building in Oxford, England (from Museum)
Image 14Workers rallying at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (from Museum)
Image 15Construction of Titanic Belfast in 2010 (from Museum)
Image 16A guided tour group at the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, Mexico (from Museum)
Image 17Moai figure at the British Museum (from Museum)
Image 18An exhibition of the remains of Native Americans at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1908 (from Museum)
Image 19Paintings arranged in groupings in the "salon style" (from Museum)
Image 20Restoration of a gilded mirror by a conservator (from Museum)

Selected museum

View of the main facade from Madison Drive

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. With 4.4 million visitors in 2023, it was the second most-visited museum in the United States.

Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities. The main building has an overall area of 1.5 million square feet (140,000 m²) with 325,000 square feet (30,200 m²) of exhibition and public space and houses over 1,000 employees.

The museum's collections contain over 146 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, the largest natural history collection in the world. It is also home to about 185 professional natural history scientists—the largest group of scientists dedicated to the study of natural and cultural history in the world. (Full article...)

Subcategories