MUSEUMS

The word "museum," from the ancient Greek mouseion, originally referred to any location sacred to the Muses (Mousa). The Muses, who were the ancient Greek goddesses of the arts, were honored and revered by poets, playwrights, and artists. Any place inhabited by the Muses was likewise considered sacred and a source of divine inspiration. The playwright Euripides, for example, in the fifth century B. C. E., described mouseia as places of beauty and nature where birds sang and poets were inspired.

In the fourth century B. C. E., a formal sanctuary dedicated to the Muses was established just below Mount Helicon, a mountain in central Greece. According to legend, the Muses first appeared to the poet Hesiod (ca. 700 B. C. E.) on this very hillside, telling him to sing of the gods as he tended his father's sheep. The sanctuary featured an open-air amphitheater, where statues and other works of art were displayed, and supposedly held a manuscript copy of the collected works of Hesiod. This was, perhaps, the first place ever called a "museum."

The History of Museums

Over the centuries, the notion of a museum evolved from any place sacred to the Muses to the multifaceted museums of today. In the modern world, a museum is defined as any institution that maintains a collection of objects to be preserved, studied, and displayed for educational or aesthetic purposes. This is very different from the original definition of a mouseion.

The notion of collecting objects is deeply rooted in human history. Collecting is an activity with great symbolic significance. Collections have been used to honor the dead; Neolithic burial sites often show the dead interred with objects of personal or religious significance. Collections of sacred objects honor the gods; sacrificial offerings accumulate at altars and in temples. Collections of plunder signify conquest and domination; plundered artifacts convey a sense of power over the vanquished. Collections of all types can express admiration or fascination with whatever the objects represent; sports fans, for example, collect memorabilia from their favorite teams or players. However, the mere act of collecting things does not make the resulting collection a museum.

Museums in Antiquity

In the classical world of Greece and Rome, sacred objects were often collected and placed in temples or sanctuaries as offerings to the gods. The Parthenon in Athens, for example, contained many valuable objects ranging from gold and silver artifacts to inlaid statues and carved marble reliefs. These works of art, although now scattered in museums around the world, were originally intended as gifts to the gods; they belonged to the divinity to whom they were offered. The treasuries of classical temples, usually filled with a clutter of precious objects, were generally not open to the public, and the objects contained therein were displayed only on rare occasions. Thus, these temples could not be considered museums.

Collections of objects were not restricted to temples and other religious sites in the ancient world. Works of art were also collected by individuals and displayed in public spaces. Individual aristocrats in ancient Rome would fill their urban homes and country villas with exquisite art. Great public arenas in ancient Greece, such as those at Delphi or Olympia, would feature works of art dedicated in commemoration of great accomplishments. Likewise, the Forum in Rome was filled with exquisite statues representing important historic figures. Although the works of art displayed in these settings would all be considered museum artifacts today, none of the original locations would have been referred to as museums.

There were a few locations in the classical world that could possibly have been considered museums. For example, famous schools in Athens, such as the Lyceum or the Academy, maintained collections of objects that were used for educational purposes. Philosophical classes in Athens were often based on empirical observations of natural objects. The philosopher Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, encouraged his students to collect specimens from the natural world for the purposes of examination. During his conquest of Persia, Alexander had exotic specimens captured and sent home to Aristotle for further study.

The Museum at Alexandria

It was not until the early third century B. C. E. when an institution emerged that most closely resembled the modern notion of a museum. This occurred with the creation of the Museum at Alexandria in Egypt, one of the most famous institutions in the ancient world. Established in 290 B. C. E. by Ptolemy I, the Museum was a place devoted to learning and intellectual reflection, where scholars gathered to study collections of objects. Designed by Demetrius of Phaleron, a former student of Aristotle, the institution was destined to become the center for intellectual learning in the classical world.

Funded by the Egyptian Ptolemaic monarchy, the Museum featured extensive collections of objects, an observatory, lecture halls, gardens, living quarters, and a library. The Library, perhaps the most famous branch of the Museum, grew rapidly over the centuries and at its height contained almost half a million volumes. For almost six centuries, scholars from around the world would travel to Egypt to study the resources of the Museum and contribute the fruits of their own knowledge to the Museum's holdings.

The scholars who worked at the Museum formed the world's first academic community. They were governed by a priest and supported by the state. Like scholars in an early university, they lived, worked, and studied within the institution. Their primary activity was research, and they gave few lectures.

Museums in the Middle Ages

The Museum at Alexandria was destroyed during civil warfare around 270 C. E. After this, the collecting of artifacts once again became a private affair. Rich individuals would collect great works of art according to their interests and tastes for their own personal enjoyment. Communities of scholars, such as monks in monasteries, would collect great works of literature or artistic effort for posterity, hiding them from the public in order to protect them for the future. The first university museum, the Ashmolean, was founded in 1683 at Oxford University in England. However, even universities would restrict access to their collections by the general public.

Over the centuries, displaying works of fine art grew into an art itself for individual collectors. These collectors would exhibit their collections in elaborate displays that ranged in size from vast galleries to tiny cabinets. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a specialized type of collecting emerged and grew in popularity. Referred to as wunderkammer, these were cabinets of curiosities. The owners of these cabinets took great pride in gathering together objects that were rarely seen and hard to acquire. They particularly prized rare specimens of natural history, such as butterflies or fossils. Yet these collections existed almost exclusively for the enjoyment of the collectors, their friends, and their families; the collections were rarely opened to the public.

Early Modern Museums

The first true public museums were created as royal collections of art and were gradually made accessible for the public to enjoy. In Paris, for example, galleries of art initially housed in royal palaces and collected by generations of French kings were made available to select members of the public in the 1750s. However, it was not until 1793, during the French Revolution, that these galleries were opened to the public as the Louvre Museum.

The British Museum was founded in 1753 as perhaps the first public museum. In contrast to earlier museums that focused primarily on art, the British Museum emphasized both natural history and cultural heritage materials. However, its resemblance to the modern version of the museum was slight. Prospective visitors had to apply for admission in writing and in advance, and it could take two weeks to receive permission to enter the facility. Groups of visitors were limited to fifteen people or less and visits had to be restricted to two hours in length. Moreover, visitors had to stay together on their tour, and only two such tours were allowed each day.

The idea that museums should be institutions open to the general public gained in momentum with the growing notion that the nation-state could display collections of prestigious works of art for its own glorification. Thus, during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, countries around the world began to open national museums. Well-known examples include the Vatican Museum in Rome, the Royal Danish Museum in Copenhagen, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. These institutions paved the way for the modern museum.

The Modern Museum

Today, many different types of institutions can be called museums. These include zoos, planetariums, aquariums, art galleries, nature centers, historical monuments, botanical gardens, science and technology centers, and so on. The wide range of institutions that consider themselves museums means that it can prove very difficult to classify museums neatly into distinct categories. Museums are thus often classified in many different ways and using many different methods. They can be grouped by the nature of the objects they collect, by the audience they serve, by their intended purpose, by their size, by their source of funding, and so on.

Types of Museums

The most popular method of classifying museums is by the nature of their collections. This can be difficult to determine as collections in various museums often overlap. Some museums have very specialized collections while some have very general ones; most museums fall somewhere in between. Many museums include collections of more than one type. However, despite unavoidable overlaps between categories, this method of classifying museums has the advantage of being based on the collections themselves. This approach arranges museums into categories in a way that seems logical to most museum visitors. Moreover, it provides a way of illustrating some of the key differences in approaches different types of museums bring to their collections and intended audiences.

For the purposes of this entry, museums can be divided into four general types: (1) art museums, (2) science and technology museums, (3) natural history museums, and (4) cultural history museums.

Art museums collect and present a variety of artifacts considered to be of aesthetic value. Artifacts exhibited in art museums include paintings, sculpture, and the decorative arts. Art museums often include historical objects, traditionally drawn from classical antiquity, among their collections. However, most art museums collect artifacts based on their aesthetic merits rather than their cultural or historical importance. Thus, it is usually sufficient for artifacts in art galleries to be exhibited loosely arranged by time period or artist. When displaying artifacts of aesthetic value, the context in which the collections are displayed is less important than in other museums where artifacts might have to be displayed in an appropriate historical context to be understood. In general, art museums tend to be more focused on personal appreciation of art, with the interpretation of artifacts left up to the individual. Exhibits in art museums, therefore, are usually less didactic in nature than in other forms of museums. Modern art museums are often considered experimental; many are designed and constructed in an attempt to show the latest in modern artistic styles. The Guggenheim Museum in New York or the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris are good examples of museums of modern art that attempt to embody modern art conventions in their own construction. Other well-known art museums include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Museums of science and technology collect objects and design exhibitions that demonstrate scientific principles, illustrate important discoveries in the history of science, or describe important technological innovations. Sometimes these objects are valuable and irreplaceable artifacts of science and technology, such as the Orville and Wilbur Wright's airplane, Galileo's telescope, or Charles Babbage's analytical engine. Often, however, the emphasis in the exhibit is placed not on the artifacts themselves but on the process the artifacts illustrate. In these situations, the museum will collect objects that can be used to demonstrate lessons, processes, or scientific principles to their visitors. For this reason, exhibits in science museums are typically very hands-on, featuring demonstrations and interactive displays with an emphasis on education. Well-known examples of museums of science and technology include the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

Natural history museums preserve and present specimens collected from the world of nature. Objects collected by natural history museums include birds, mammals, insects, plants, fossils, rocks, and reptiles. Exhibits within these museums cover such academic fields as botany, geology, paleontology, and zoology. Natural history collections were found among the earliest types of museums, such as the British Museum in London. Natural history was a popular hobby for individuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and large collections of interesting specimens were often donated to growing national museums of natural history. From an educational standpoint, museums of natural history have proven useful for scholars and students of all ages and from all disciplines. By providing collections of animals, plants, and minerals, neatly organized and arranged by type or classification, such museums provide an invaluable service to individuals who may not otherwise have access to rare specimens. Well-known examples of museums of natural history include the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the Natural History Museum in London, the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Field Museum in Chicago, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Cultural history museums cover a variety of topics, cultures, and time periods. They can be found at many different levels in society. They range from museums of local history that illustrate the history of a city or county, to national museums that exhibit the history of an entire country, to museums of world history that display artifacts collected from all cultures throughout history and around the globe. In addition, museums of history often focus on different types of collections. Cultural history museums with a focus on archaeology, for example, gather artifacts from antiquity, such as Greece, Rome, Egypt, or Mesoamerica, to almost present day, such as colonial America. Anthropological or ethnographic museums typically present artifacts arranged by culture and attempt to provide the visitor with a new way of looking at different world cultures. History museums of a general nature often present their collections chronologically, allowing their visitors to follow the evolution of objects in their collections through time. Usually, cultural history museums display artifacts that were once of utilitarian value, not just aesthetically pleasing. Such museums make an effort to situate their artifacts in a historical context; many often use models or simulated environments to provide an appropriate setting for their artifacts. These museums are essentially educational in their exhibit design philosophy; they usually offer more interpretation and explanation than other types of museums. Well-known examples of cultural history museums include the Museum of American History at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the British Museum in London.

Finally, there are also specialty museums of various miscellaneous types that do not fit neatly into the above classification scheme. These include museums that feature collections of unusual artifacts of a particular type, like baseball cards or Superman memorabilia; museums that cater to a specialized audience, such as children's museums; or museums dedicated to a specialized time period or geographic area, such as a museum of a small town or community.

The Purpose of Museums

All museums collect, preserve, and interpret objects. When working with their collections, modern museum professionals aim to accomplish three goals of equal importance: (1) to preserve the artifacts entrusted to their care; (2) to research and study their collections; and (3) to educate the public about the value, educational or aesthetic, of their holdings. All museums face the same problems in achieving these goals.

A fundamental aspect of collecting is the desire to preserve that which one collects. From the moment an artifact enters a museum's collection, museum professionals must take every precaution to ensure that no further damage or deterioration occurs to the artifact. This is called preventative conservation. Conservation activities form an important part of the artifact lifecycle in the museum. Although many visitors to a museum believe that the only responsibility the museum has is to care for the artifacts on exhibit, usually only 5 percent to 10 percent of a museum's entire collection is displayed to the public at any one time. The vast majority of a museum's collection remains locked away in storage facilities. It is crucial that proper care be taken of those artifacts in storage. This includes careful monitoring of environmental conditions, the storage of artifacts in nonreactive, nonharmful containers, and occasional conservation activities to ensure that artifacts remain undamaged over the years. If museum professionals do not take steps to preserve their collections, then their artifacts will eventually deteriorate beyond repair. Therefore, preservation is an essential goal of the modern museum professional.

For thousands of years, scholars have relied on museums to provide collections of objects worthy of study. Likewise, it is essential that the collection of a museum be properly examined, studied, and researched by the appropriate experts. The role of the curator in the museum is to ensure that the museum's artifacts are identified, made available to experts for study, and the resulting knowledge recorded and preserved for future scholars. In this way, the museum is fulfilling its role as an academic institution that began in Alexandria more than two thousand years ago. Today, many university museums maintain research collections; these collections are usually not displayed to the public and are reserved for academic research only. Such museums pride themselves on having extensive research collections, ranging from rare books to herpetological specimens, which attract researchers from around the world to come and study at their facility. For the museum professional, research is required to create programs for both educational and scholarly purposes. Research is also necessary to learn proper methods of preserving the artifacts in the care of the museum. Some artifacts will require special conservation methods. Other artifacts, such as bones from ancient graves, may be culturally sensitive and require special handling or display. Only with appropriate research can the museum ensure that its collections are being properly handled, treated, and exhibited.

Visitors to a museum today take for granted that their experience will be an educational one, but this was not always the case. The notion that a museum should serve an educational role outside of the academic sphere is a relatively new idea, rooted in the nineteenth century. The Royal Danish Museum in Copenhagen was one of the first museums to present its collections in an instructional manner—metal artifacts, for example, were arranged to illustrate the evolution of the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Today, virtually all artifacts are displayed in a manner that emphasizes the educational experience of the visitor. Exhibits introduce important themes, label copy keeps the visitor informed of the facts as well as the museum's interpretation of the artifacts, and tour guides emphasize the most important lessons to be learned from any given display. Museums today have different means of reaching their audiences. Most museums maintain education departments that train docents and other volunteers, offer special education programs, or bring educational out-reach activities to the schools. Additional items, such as paper guides, booklets, or audiocassettes, allows visitors to delve into exhibit topics of interest to them in more depth without overwhelming other visitors with extraneous labels and displays. In general, museums have found that by educating the public, they increase the public's interest in the collections of the museum, benefiting both museum and museum visitor.

It is important to remember that from the moment an artifact enters a museum, it enters an artificial environment. An artifact on display or in storage in a museum will follow a life very different from its original or intended purpose. A cup that one thousand years ago was used for drinking will sit in a case, be kept for study, or be displayed to schoolchildren. No longer a utilitarian object, its utility lies in its value as an educational or research tool. Once an object becomes a museum artifact, it enters a new environment. The role of the museum professional is to facilitate this transition through preservation, research, and education.

Museum Organizations

The job of the museum professional is complicated, and many organizations exist to help museum professionals in their daily work. The American Association of Museums (AAM) was founded in 1906 to assist museums and museum professionals across the country. The AAM serves as an accreditation organization for museums, offers guidance in maintaining professional standards, and educates museum professionals through annual conferences, journals, and publications. More than sixteen thousand members, both individuals and institutions, are represented by the AAM. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) was founded in 1946 and has more than fifteen thousand members from 150 countries. ICOM is affiliated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and provides an international forum for museum professionals to discuss global issues of museum education, responsibilities, and professionalism.

With the assistance of such organizations, the job of the museum professional has steadily evolved from an amateur to more professional status. In addition, museum studies has emerged as an approved field of study in its own right. It is now possible to obtain a master's degree in museum studies at many universities. Museum-studies programs worldwide train future museum professionals in the techniques and methods of the museum field. The establishment of museum studies as an approved academic discipline has helped museums around the world become more professional in managing their valuable resources.

Museums and Information Resources

Museums are responsible for maintaining and preserving many valuable resources, the most important of which are their collections of artifacts. These objects are vital information resources that document the worlds of art, science, nature, or history. By preserving their artifacts, museums are often preserving a direct link to the human past or to the natural world that may no longer exist outside the walls of the museum.

Equally important, however, are the data museums collect about their artifacts through research and study. Knowledge about a collection is accumulated through the efforts of curators, academic scholars, and other museum professionals. This information is then recorded in permanent form. The resulting documents form surrogate records that both describe and represent the artifacts of the museum. Surrogate records provide a valuable service by offering a source of data about artifacts that can be manipulated and accessed far more easily than the actual objects themselves. Thus, when a curator needs to know how many paintings a museum has collected from a particular artist or a scholar wants to study a certain type of ceramic vessels, these individuals can consult data contained in the surrogate records while the artifacts themselves remain safely in storage. As museums become more professional, there is an increased awareness of the need to keep artifacts safe, secure, and undisturbed. The less frequently a museum artifact needs to be handled, the longer it will remain undamaged. To this end, more museums are limiting access to their collections, and more museums are encouraging research to be conducted using surrogate records. It is essential, therefore, that the data in the records of the museum be accurate and up-to-date.

The task of managing information resources in museums has now become a science. The integration of advanced information technology into museum environments has had a serious effect on the way modern museums manage their data records. Information science professionals worldwide now study the role of information technology in managing museum information resources. This field of study is generally known as "museum informatics."

Information Management in Museums

Museums have always had a need to manage their information resources. They need to know not only what they have but also what they know about what they have. In the past, information about museum collections was maintained in paper and card files. Access to these records was usually restricted to museum employees; moreover, search capabilities in these files were usually limited to only a few key fields. For example, card files may have been sorted by donor name, by accession number, or by title of object. Assuming the cards were kept up-to-date and properly organized, accessing data by any of these fields was usually straightforward. However, locating a set of records sorted by culture or material type would have been a difficult if not impossible task for even the most skilled and knowledgeable museum employee.

Modern information systems in museums offer museum professionals many new methods of organizing and accessing data. Such systems work in conjunction with existing paper records to augment the information-management capabilities of the museum. Electronic database systems allow museum employees to search and sort their computer records by almost any field. In addition, museum professionals are now able to store far more data about their artifacts on the computer than ever before possible on accession cards or ledger files. Also, by maintaining artifact data in electronic format, modern museums now have the capability to share data about their collections with other institutions in ways never before possible. Organizations are currently working to devise standards that will allow museums around the world to collaborate in their efforts to identify and research their collections. By sharing artifact records from one organization to another, museums may be able to advance significantly the state of knowledge in their fields.

However, as museums work to increase access to their information resources, some problems have been exacerbated; especially troublesome are those that concern copyright and intellectual or cultural property. The question of ownership of artifacts has traditionally been a difficult one for museum professionals. Whether or not the British Museum should return the Parthenon Marbles (also known as the Elgin Marbles) to Greece, for example, has been hotly debated since Lord Elgin removed these massive carvings from Athens in the late-eighteenth century. Laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) exist to ensure that the rights of the original owners of museum artifacts are protected. As museums increase their online presence, many of these issues are now returning to the forefront of intellectual debate. Additionally, many museum professionals worry that by making electronic images and data about their collection available online, they are encouraging individuals to violate copyright regulations by making their own digital copies of works of art.

New Opportunities for Digital Museums

Despite these difficulties, the "wired" museum raises all sorts of new possibilities for the museum professional. Within the museum itself, interactive exhibits offer visitors new options for an in-depth exploration of exhibits. Computer displays can provide additional detailed data about each exhibit in the museum and allow visitors to interact with museum displays in ways never before possible. Electronic displays can help museums meet the accessibility needs of their visitors, providing audio, enlarged text, and so on, as needed. Note that electronic systems augment the artifacts of a museum, enhancing the experience of visiting a museum but never completely replacing the original collections.

Online, virtual museums offer digital visitors everything from information about the museum's location and hours of operation to virtual tours of the museum's galleries and collections. Many museums have information records about their artifacts linked to their websites in a manner that allows the general public to retrieve digital images and detailed textual descriptions of any artifact in the collection of the museum. Many museum educators create specialized educational outreach programs for schoolchildren. These programs, available online over the museum's website, are often integrated with school curricula and national educational standards. Finally, interactive online exhibits are able to offer virtual visitors specialized access to artifact data. For example, by gathering information about visitor interests online, museums can offer dynamic exhibits over the Internet that are specifically created for each individual patron.

The museum of the future will use technology to connect distant museums, museum professionals, and museum patrons. A scholar from New York who is examining over the Internet the rich collections of the Hermitage will be able to interact, via a three-dimensional virtual display, with a fellow researcher from Berlin who is studying the same collection. Students, teachers, scholars, and members of the general public, armed with only a computer and an Internet connection, will be able to browse the collections of every museum worldwide, including artifacts not currently on display in the museum. Individuals will have immediate access to the accumulated knowledge of a wide variety of experts in every field from every country. Virtual visitors physically located thousands of miles apart will stand next to each other in three-dimensional representations of archaeological sites so realistic as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, will handle three-dimensional virtual representations of priceless artifacts rendered with laser mapping accurate to the micrometer, and will share data and other information resources in ways never before possible.

See also:Archives, Public Records, and Records Management; Archivists; Curators; Databases, Electronic; Internet and the World Wide Web.

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Paul F. Marty