Portal:Museums

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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 general articles

Image 1
The Wild Center, a natural history museum in Tupper Lake, New York, United States

A green museum is a museum that incorporates concepts of sustainability into its operations, programming, and facility. Many green museums use their collections to produce exhibitions, events, classes, and other programming to educate the public about the natural environment. Many, but not all, green museums reside in a building featuring sustainable architecture and technology. Green museums interpret their own sustainable practices and green design to present a model of behavior.

Green museums strive to help people become more conscious of the limitations of their world, and how their actions affect their world. The goal is to create positive change by encouraging people to make sustainable choices in their daily lives. They use their position as community-centered institutions to create a culture of sustainability. (Full article...)
Image 2
Fife Folk Museum exhibit.

A folk museum is a museum that deals with folk culture and heritage. Such museums cover local life in rural communities. A folk museum typically displays historical objects that were used as part of the people's everyday lives. Examples of such objects include clothes and tools. Many folk museums are also open-air museums and some cover rural history. (Full article...)
Image 3
"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities.

Cabinets of curiosities (German: Kunstkammer and Kunstkabinett), also known as wonder-rooms (German: Wunderkammer), were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Although more rudimentary collections had preceded them, the classic cabinets of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century. The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums.

Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular interests of their curators but also as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society. There are said to be two main types of cabinets. As R. J. W. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes." Evans goes on to explain that "no clear distinction existed between the two categories: all collecting was marked by curiosity, shading into credulity, and by some sort of universal underlying design". (Full article...)
Image 4

The TU 142 Aircraft Museum is a preserved Tupolev Tu-142 located in Visakhapatnam, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Built as part of Vizag city tourism promotion, it was formally inaugurated by President of India Ram Nath Kovind in December 2017 (Full article...)
Image 5
The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the largest natural history museum in the world

A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a scientific institution with natural history collections that include current and historical records of animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, geology, paleontology, climatology, and more. (Full article...)
Image 6
Hida Minzoku Mura Folk Village, Takayama, Gifu, Japan

An open-air museum is a museum that exhibits collections of buildings and artifacts outdoors. It is also frequently known as a museum of buildings or a folk museum. (Full article...)
Image 7
A mounted Elephant skeleton at the Cole Museum of Zoology, situated in the University of Reading's Whiteknights Campus.

A university museum is a repository of collections run by a university, typically founded to aid teaching and research within the institution of higher learning. The Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford in England is an early example, originally housed in the building that is now the Museum of the History of Science. A more recent example is the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, originally constructed as a hotel in 1796 it is now the official museum of the University of Bath. (Full article...)
Image 8
Migration museums cover human migration in the past, present and future. (Full article...)
Image 9
Restored Filipino heritage houses in Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar

A living museum, also known as a living history museum, is a type of museum which recreates historical settings to simulate a past time period, providing visitors with an experiential interpretation of history. It is a type of museum that recreates to the fullest extent conditions of a culture, natural environment or historical period, in an example of living history. (Full article...)
Image 10
A modern wax sculpture of Cecilia Cheung at Madame Tussauds Hong Kong.

A wax museum or waxworks usually consists of a collection of wax sculptures representing famous people from history and contemporary personalities exhibited in lifelike poses, wearing real clothes.

Some wax museums have a special section dubbed the "Chamber of Horrors", in which the more grisly exhibits are displayed. Some collections are more specialized, as, for example, collections of wax medical models once used for training medical professionals. Many museums or displays in historical houses that are not wax museums as such use wax figures as part of their displays. The origin of wax museums goes back to the early 18th century at least, and wax funeral effigies of royalty and some other figures exhibited by their tombs had essentially been tourist attractions well before that. (Full article...)
Image 11
Muse statue, a common scholarly motif in the Hellenistic age.

The Mouseion of Alexandria (Ancient Greek: Μουσεῖον τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας; Latin: Musaeum Alexandrinum), which arguably included the Library of Alexandria, was an institution said to have been founded by Ptolemy I Soter and his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Originally, the word mouseion meant any place that was dedicated to the Muses, often related to the study of music or poetry, but later associated with sites of learning such as Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum.

The Ptolemies reputedly established their Mouseion and Library with the intention of bringing together some of the best scholars of the Hellenistic world and collect all the books known at the time. Although it did not imply a collection of works of art, the word mouseion is the root for the modern usage of the word museum. (Full article...)
Image 12
A private museum in Mir, Belarus.

A private museum is a collection, usually on a very limited topic and operated by individual enthusiasts, collectors, clubs or companies. (Full article...)
Image 13
An imaginarium (pl.: imaginaria) is a place devoted to the imagination. There are various types of imaginaria, centers largely devoted to stimulating and cultivating the imagination, towards scientific, artistic, commercial, recreational, or spiritual ends. (Full article...)
Image 14
New York City's Museum of Sex

A sex museum is a museum that displays erotic art, historical sexual aids, and documents on the history of erotica. They were popular in Europe at the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s, the era of the sexual revolution.
Since the 1990s, these museums are often called erotic museums or erotic art museums instead of sex museums. (Full article...)
Image 15
An economuseum or économusée is small-scale production of goods in a workshop environment focusing on the preservation and perpetuation of traditional skills and craftsmanship. The function of the economuseum is to promote the products of local craftspeople, create employment and in the end, promote immaterial, cultural heritage.

Shop owners provide the visiting public with information on techniques, skills, and production processes. In addition to products for sale, all economuseums have developed educational information material: historic product exhibits, present-day production samples and archive material. (Full article...)
Image 16
Mihkli Farm Museum in Viki, Estonia.

A farm museum, or museum farm, is a museum based on a historical farm and its buildings, presenting agricultural history. Often the farm is still a working farm, for demonstration and educational purposes. Also, some farm museums has been requested to relocate refers to a museum focused on agriculture, farming history, or rural life that has been physically moved or shifted from its original location to a new site. This relocation can occur for various reasons, such as preservation efforts, urban development, expansion, or improved accessibility for visitors.

See List of open-air and living history museums in the United States for a list of such farms in the U.S., or Open-air museum for farms in other countries. (Full article...)
Image 17
The Fortifications Interpretation Centre in Valletta, Malta

An interpretation centre, interpretive centre, or visitor interpretive centre is an institution for dissemination of knowledge of natural or cultural heritage. Interpretation centres are a kind of new-style museum, often associated with visitor centres or ecomuseums, and located in connection to cultural, historic or natural sites.

Interpretation centres use different means of communication to enhance the understanding of heritage. To aid and stimulate the discovery process and the visitor's intellectual and emotional connection to heritage, the main presentation strategy tends to be user-friendly and interactive, and often use scenographic exhibitions and multimedia programs. Many interpretation centres have temporary exhibitions related to a specific aspect of the site. (Full article...)
Image 18
Ecclesiastical treasury in Vienna's Hofburg Palace

Schatzkammer, a German word which means "treasury" or "treasure chamber", is a term sometimes used in English for the collection of treasures, especially objets d’art in precious metals and jewels, of a ruler or other collector which are kept in a secure room and often found in the basement of a palace or castle. It also often included the wider types of object typical of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. A very small but evocative Renaissance room in a tower at Lacock Abbey was designed for keeping and viewing the treasures of the newly rich owner.
The term is normally used of the collections of European rulers or very wealthy families.^{[dubious – discuss]} Well-known examples are: (Full article...)
Image 19
The Buell Children's Museum in Pueblo, Colorado was ranked #2 children's art museum in the United States by Child Magazine.

Children's museums are institutions that provide exhibits and programs to stimulate informal learning experiences for children. In contrast with traditional museums that typically have a hands-off policy regarding exhibits, children's museums feature interactive exhibits that are designed to be manipulated by children. The theory behind such exhibits is that activity can be as educational as instruction, especially in early childhood. Most children's museums are nonprofit organizations, and many are run by volunteers or by very small professional staffs.

International professional organizations of children's museums include the Association of Children's Museums (ACM), which was formed in 1962 as the American Association of Youth Museums (AAYM) and in 2007 counted 341 member institutions in 23 countries, and The Hands On! Europe Association of Children's Museum (HO!E), established in 1994, with member institutions in 34 countries as of 2007. Many museums that are members of ACM offer reciprocal memberships, allowing members of one museum to visit all the others for free or for a discounted fee. (Full article...)
Image 20
Antique cuckoo clocks in the interior of Cuckooland Museum, a specialized museum in Tabley, England

A museum is distinguished by a collection of often unique objects that forms the core of its activities for exhibitions, education, research, etc. This differentiates it from an archive or library, where the contents may be more paper-based, replaceable and less exhibition oriented, or a private collection of art formed by an individual, family or institution that may grant no public access. A museum normally has a collecting policy for new acquisitions, so only objects in certain categories and of a certain quality are accepted into the collection. The process by which an object is formally included in the collection is called accessioning and each object is given a unique accession number.

Museum collections, and archives in general, are normally catalogued in a collection catalogue, traditionally in a card index, but nowadays in a computerized database. Transferring collection catalogues onto computer-based media is a major undertaking for most museums. All new acquisitions are normally catalogued on a computer in modern museums, but there is typically a backlog of old catalogue entries to be computerized as time and funding allows. (Full article...)
Image 21
A Sèvres dinner-service on display at the Museo delle porcellane di Firenze.

A ceramics museum is a museum wholly or largely devoted to ceramics, usually ceramic art. Its collections may also include glass and enamel, but typically concentrate on pottery, including porcelain. Most national collections are in a more general museum covering all of the arts, or just the decorative arts. However, there are a number of specialized ceramics museums, with some focusing on the ceramics of just one country, region or manufacturer. Others have international collections, which may be centered on ceramics from Europe or East Asia or have a more global emphasis.

Outstanding major ceramics collections in general museums include The Palace Museum, Beijing, with 340,000 pieces, and the National Palace Museum in Taipei city, Taiwan (25,000 pieces); both are mostly derived from the Chinese Imperial collection, and are almost entirely of pieces from China. In London, the Victoria and Albert Museum (over 75,000 pieces, mostly after 1400 CE) and British Museum (mostly before 1400 CE) have very strong international collections. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC (12,000, all East Asian) have perhaps the best of the many fine collections in the large city museums of the United States. The Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, New York, has more than 45,000 glass objects. (Full article...)
Image 22
Museum artifact: the nose section of Avro Arrow RL 206 in the Canada Aviation Museum.

An aviation museum, air museum, or air and space museum is a museum exhibiting the history and artifacts of aviation. In addition to actual, replica or accurate reproduction aircraft, exhibits can include photographs, maps, models, dioramas, clothing and equipment used by aviators.

Aviation museums vary in size from housing just one or two aircraft to hundreds. They may be owned by national, regional or local governments or be privately owned. Some museums address the history and artifacts of space exploration as well, illustrating the close association between aeronautics and astronautics. (Full article...)
Image 23
The National Computer & Communications Museum

A computer museum is devoted to the study of historic computer hardware and software, where a "museum" is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment", as defined by the International Council of Museums.

Some computer museums exist within larger institutions, such as the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom; and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. Others are dedicated specifically to computing, such as:
- the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, United States.
- the American Computer & Robotics Museum in Bozeman, Montana, United States.
- The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, United Kingdom.
- The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, United Kingdom
- the Nexon Computer Museum in Jeju Province. South Korea.
(Full article...)
Image 24
A national history museum or national historical museum is a history museum dedicated to presenting artifacts and exhibits reflecting the history of a particular nation, usually its home country. The earliest public museums, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Louvre Museum in Paris, were focused on natural history and art, respectively, and not necessarily on subjects related to the history of any nation. Following Napoleon's use of the Louvre as a center of national pride during his reign, other countries began to use museums not just to store artifacts of aesthetic or educational value, but to portray the country itself in a positive light.

Historically, some national history museums have been used purely as propaganda tools through which governments attempt to convey an official history. For example, "the Nazi regime employed the museum as a deliberate tool of propaganda and 'public education'". It has further been argued that "the very idea of an officially sponsored national history museum is simply outdated" in light of the trend towards pluralistic interpretation of artifacts. On the other hand, it has been argued that: "To create a national history museum that discards unitary national narratives as well as causal trajectories (the teleology of the nation)—in effect to subvert the form—is probably impossible". One concern of national history museums, therefore, is how to fairly and neutrally depict negative periods in a nation's own history. (Full article...)
Image 25
A wooden main building of the Kniivilä Local Heritage Museum in the Hailuoto Island, Finland

A heritage centre, center, or museum, is a public facility – typically a museum, monument, visitor centre, or park – that is primarily dedicated to the presentation of historical and cultural information about a place and its people, and often also including, to some degree, the area's natural history. Heritage centres typically differ from most traditional museums in featuring a high proportion of "hands-on" exhibits and live or lifelike specimens and practical artifacts.

Some are open-air museums – heritage parks – devoted to depiction of daily life or occupational activity at a particular time and place, and may feature re-creations of typical buildings of an era. Such sites are often used for experimental archaeology, and as shooting locations for documentaries and historical-fiction films and television. A few are rebuilt archaeological sites, using the excavated foundations of original buildings, some restore historic structures that were not yet lost, while others are mock-ups built near actual sites of historic value (which may still be subject to ongoing excavation, study, and preservation). Many also have living museum features, such as costumed staff, demonstrations of and short courses in historical craft-working, dramatic presentations (live-action mock combat, etc.), and other living history activities. Others may be more narrowly focused on a particular occupation or industry, such as rail transport or the early factories or mines around which a community developed. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that State Auto Mutual's life-size nativity scene was donated to the Museum of Catholic Art and History in 2023 for display at St. Joseph Cathedral?
... that the now-closed Dinosaur Wildlife museum exhibited three fox squirrels posed to fight in a boxing ring?
... that the New Zealand stonefly Stenoperla prasina was the five millionth specimen digitised by the Natural History Museum in London?
... that the firm of Israel Sack supplied American antiques to leading private collectors and museums, including the Winterthur Museum, The Henry Ford, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
... that the Museum of Classic Sci-Fi is located in the cellar of a house in Allendale, Northumberland?
... that for fifteen years Joseph Henry Gest was both the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the president of the Rookwood Pottery Company, spending mornings at one and afternoons at the other?

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Selected images

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