Museum

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For other uses, see Museum (disambiguation).

Post-Repatriation Display Case at the Getty Villa.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's World-Renowned Online Store

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.^[1] There are tens of thousands of museums all over the world, but in American its only Art museums that really matter. For a short list, see the wikipedia entry List of Art museums, none of the others really matter. The American Association of Museum's Mediocre Technology Standing Professional Committee defines them thus:

“

Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artifacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society or until they need to repatriate them to foreign countries. In recent years, museums have barraged their visitors with the gratuitous use of technology, in some cases this has worked extremely well, in other cases the result has been laughable. The worst offenders are those rich and bloated Art museums, who churn out gadget after gadget and don’t get me started on their websites… See below for an overview of the infiltration of technology in museums.

”

1 Origins
2 Overview of the infiltration of technology in Museums
3 Types of museums
- 3.1 Art museums (Nothing else matters...)
- 3.2 History museums (If you like that kind of thing...)
- 3.3 Maritime museums (I feel sea sick...)
- 3.4 Mobile museums (I feel car sick...)
- 3.5 Natural history museums (If you've seen one dinosaur...)
- 3.6 Open air museums (Great as long as its not raining...)
- 3.7 Science museums (Where are the paintings?...)
- 3.8 Specialized museums (Is that like Special Ed?...)
- 3.9 Virtual museums (Wot no driving directions?...)
- 3.10 Zoos and Zoological Gardens (Noisy and smelly...)
4 History
5 Controversies
6 Management
7 Museum exhibition design
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links

[edit] Origins

The English "museum" comes from the Latin word, and is pluralized as "museums" (or, rarely, "musea"). It is originally from the Greek mouseion, which denotes a place or temple dedicated to the Muses (the patron divinities in Greek mythology of the arts), and hence a building set apart for study and the arts, especially the institute for philosophy and research at the Library established at Alexandria by Ptolemy I Soter c280 BCE This is considered by many to be the first museum/library.

[edit] Overview of the Infiltration of Technology in Museums

The Walker Art Center's Cutting-Edge Blogging and InterActive Technology Capture Handheld - the "WAC Biatch"

The Walker Art Center's Cutting-Edge Personal Blogging and InterActive Technology Capture Handheld - the "WAC Biatch"

With the invention of the (barely) portable battery in middle of the 20th Century, museums realized that they could use them to power devices that visitors could carry around with them to enhance their experience of the collection, while enhancing their physique since these devices were extremely large and heavy.

With the invention of the Phillips Compact Cassette tape in the early 70’s museums invented the Audio Guide. These guides were light enough to easily carry around, unfortunately this meant that the visitor could actually concentrate on the content and realized it was not very good. Despite this, lots of museum visitors paid to use them.

SFMOMA's Cutting-Edge Handheld Personal In-Gallery system - The "HandyPIG".

SFMOMA's ADA-Compliant HandyPIG - The "VibraPIG".

SFMOMA's Cutting-Edge ADA-Compliant HandyPIG - The "VibraPIG".

By the mid 1980’s some enterprising museums who had had enough of audio guides and wanted to enhance the visitor experience even more, despite never having any empirical evidence that indicated this is what visitors wanted. Coincidently, realizing a niche market opportunity, Phillips invented the Videodisk specifically for use in museums. This was a phonograph-type device that attached to a television and played videos. The so called ‘museum kiosk’ was born which required visitors to sit front of it and simply watch - couches were not provided. This proved popular despite the complications and the huge amount of work involved in mastering the disks.

The late 1980’s saw the introdcution of a 2nd generation of museum kiosk, sometimes referred to as Random Access in which the videodisk player and television were superceded by a personal computer and monitor. The common mistake of this name was that it referred to the ability of the user to choose at will, or "randomly access", pieces of content that interested them. In truth, the name referred to the fragility of the computer system and program which would crash for no apparent reason or "randomly". Thus users were only able to randomly access the content based on availability of the computer itself.

The proliferation of these Random Access Kiosks in museums led to the Museum-Vendor Birfurcation of the early 1990's. This referred to the bifurcation of rich art museums and poor-everyone-else over the former's ability to hire real computer programming staff to write custom kiosk applications in a robust language as opposed to the poor non-art museums who had to make do with an off-the-shelf package called MacroMedia Director. Notable for its frequent ability to crash, this program earned the nickname CrashoMedia Director and SpacroMedia Director. One of the main feature complaints of this program was its inability to hide the pointy cursor, alerting the user to how badly calibrated the Touchscreen was. Touchscreens had become the preferred input device for museum kiosks largely to alleviate the problem of theft of mouse balls.

Museum visitors of the mid 90's saw an explosion of badly constructed Director applications and badly calibrated touchscreens, nevertheless, museums insisted that this was all for the good and that visitors were demanding more and more technological ways to engage with the collection, once again with no good metrics.

This self-proclaimed kiosk success led directly to the historic 'Web Rush' of '96, when museums stampeded to establish a website on the new-fangled World Wide Web, despite being clueless about what it was or represented. A couple of museums had some marginal success and one museum website was actually popular receiving "1 million hits", as claimed by its technologically-illiterate Director who didn't know what a 'hit' was if it slapped him upside his head. (Later analysis revealed that this represented 4 visitors per day, who turned out to be the Museum's own I.T. staff).

For the majority of the museum community, early websites proved to be disappointing and problematic, dogged by excessive font abuse, centered and blinking text, overuse of the horizontal rule, too much padding within table cells and badly scaled images compressed to 256 colors or in many cases only 16.

At the dawn of the 21st Century, having barely survived Y2K, museums lost interest in their websites, or least executive support for them waned as technologically-illiterate directors preferred to spend the money on other self-indulgences, leaving museum technology staff to obsess about more internal applications such as Digital Asset Management systems, Collections Management Systems and how to preserve their badly organized data.

In recent years, museums have rekindled their love affair with the web due largely to the proliferation of so-called "Web 2.0" applications such as blogs and wikis, giving them the legitimate ability to air their museum's dirty laundry in public and make up timelines of trends within their industry - this being one example...

[edit] Types of museums

The National Gallery in London.

[edit] Art museums

Main article: Art museum

Czartoryski Museum, Kraków.

An Art museum, also known as an art gallery, is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art, and usually primarily paintings, illustrations, and sculpture. Collections of drawings and old master prints are often not displayed on the walls, but kept in a print room. There may be collections of applied art, including ceramics, metalwork, furniture, artist's books and other types of object.

The first publicly owned museum in Europe was the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. While initially conceived as a a palace for the offices of Florentian magistrates (hence the name), it later evolved into a display place for many of the paintings and sculpture collected by the Medici family or commissioned by them. After the house of Medici was extinguished, the art treasures remained in Florence, forming the first modern museums. The gallery had been open to visitors by request since the sixteenth century, and in 1765 it was officially opened to the public. The first museum to open to the public was The British Museum in London, which opened free to the public in 1759 after been funded a few years earlier in 1753. It was a "universal museum" with very varied collections covering art, applied art, archaeology, anthropology, history, and science, and a library. The science collections, library, paintings and modern sculpture have since been found separate homes, leaving history, archaeology, non-European and pre-Renaissance art, and prints and drawings.^{[citation needed]}

The specialised art museum is considered a fairly modern invention, the first being the Hermitage in St. Petersburg which was established in 1764.

The Louvre in Paris, France was established in 1793, soon after the French Revolution when the royal treasures were declared for the people. The Czartoryski Museum in Kraków was established in 1796 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska. This showed the beginnings of removing art collections from the private domain of aristocracy and the wealthy into the public sphere, where they were seen as sites for educating the masses in taste and cultural refinement.

[edit] History museums

The British Museum, in London.

History museums cover the knowledge of history and its relevance to the present and future. Some cover specialized curatorial aspects of history or a particular locality; others are more general. Such museums contain a wide range of objects, including documents, artifacts of all kinds, art, archaeological objects. Antiquities museums specialize in more archaeological findings.

A common type of history museum is a historic house. A historic house may be a building of special architectural interest, the birthplace or home of a famous person, or a house with an interesting history. Historic sites can also become museums, particularly those that mark public crimes, such as Tuol Sleng or Robben Island. Another type of history museum is a living museum. A living museum is where people recreate a time period to the fullest extent, including buildings, clothes and language. It is similar to historical reenactment.

[edit] Maritime museums

Main article: Maritime museum

Maritime museums specialize in the display of objects relating to ships and travel on seas and lakes. They may include a historic ship (or a replica) made accessible as a museum ship.

[edit] Mobile museums

Mobile museum is a term applied to museums that make exhibitions from a vehicle, such as a van. Some institutions, such as St. Vital Historical Society and the Walker Art Center, use the term to refer to a portion of their collection that travels to sites away from the museum for educational purposes. Other mobile museums have no "home site", and use travel as their exclusive means of presentation.

[edit] Natural history museums

The National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Museums of natural history and natural science typically exhibit work of the natural world. The focus lies on nature and culture. Exhibitions may educate the masses about dinosaurs, ancient history, and anthropology. Evolution, environmental issues, and biodiversity are major areas in natural science museums. Notable museums of this type include the Natural History Museum in London, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in Oxford, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

List of natural history museums

[edit] Open air museums

Main article: Open-air museum

An old farmhouse at the Salzburger Freilichtmuseum in Großgmain near Salzburg.

Open air museums collect and re-erect old buildings at large outdoor sites, usually in settings of re-created landscapes of the past. The first one was King Oscar II's collection near Oslo in Norway, opened in 1881. In 1891 Arthur Hazelius founded the famous Skansen in Stockholm, which became the model for subsequent open air museums in Northern and Eastern Europe, and eventually in other parts of the world. Most open air museums are located in regions where wooden architecture prevail, as wooden structures may be translocated without substantial loss of authenticity.^{[citation needed]} A more recent but related idea is realized in ecomuseums, which originated in France.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Science museums

An IMAX dome in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Science museums and technology centers revolve around scientific marvels and their history. To explain complicated inventions, a combination of demonstrations, interactive programs and thought-provoking media are used. Some museums may have exhibits on topics such as computers, aviation, railway museums, physics, astronomy, and the animal kingdom. Science museums, in particular, may consist of planetaria, or large theatre usually built around a dome. Museums may have IMAX feature films, which may provide 3-D viewing or higher quality picture. As a result, IMAX content provides a more immersive experience for people of all ages. Also new virtual museums, known as Net Museums, have been appearing. These are usually web sites belonging to real museums and containing photo galleries of items found in those real museums. This is very useful for people far away who wish to see the contents of these museums.

List of science museums

[edit] Specialized museums

Trabant cars from U2's Zoo TV Tour hanging in the lobby of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame + Museum.

A number of different museums exist to demonstrate a variety of topics. Music museums may celebrate the life and work of composers or musicians, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bellaire Ohio Toy and Plastic Brick Museum Museum in Bellaire, Ohio. Other music museums include live music recitals such as the Handel House Museum in London.

Museums targeted for the youth, such as Great Explorations, The Children's Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Miami Children's Museum, often exhibit interactive and educational material on a wide array of topics. The Baseball Hall of Fame museum is an institution of the sports category. The Corning Museum of Glass is devoted to the art, history, and science of glass. Interpretation centres are modern museums or visitors centres that often uses new means of communication with the public.

[edit] Virtual museums

A recent development with the expansion of the web, is the establishment of virtual museums. While some have no counterpart in the real world, such as LIMAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima),^[2] which has no physical location and might be confused with the city's own museum, other online initiatives like the Virtual Museum of Canada^[3] provide physical museums with a web presence, as well as online curatorial platforms such as Rhizome.^[4] The art historian Griselda Pollock elaborated a virtual feminist museum, spreading between classical art to contemporary art.^[5]

[edit] Zoos and Zoological Gardens

Main article: Zoo

Although zoos are not often thought of as museums, they are considered "living museums". They exist for the same purpose as other museums: to educate, inspire action, study, and preserve a collection. Notable zoos include the Wildlife Conservation International in New York, London Zoo, the San Diego Zoo, Berlin Zoo, Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, Frankfurt Zoo and Zoo Zurich in Switzerland.