My definition of a museum

As someone who literally searches out museums wherever I go, I actually find this a little harder to answer than I thought I would! I suppose the easy answer of what a museum is, for me, is, “a facility that the public can visit that holds a collection of artifacts or objects that showcase the area’s cultural and/or natural history”. But as the Soundcloud podcast pointed out, it’s exceedingly difficult for some museums to follow that. Maybe a museum is actually only open to members of a university, be they students or staff, as a research area. Or maybe a children’s museum has only educational toys and exhibits that don’t necessarily fall within the scope of a “collection”. (Although I would argue that, personally.) And sometimes museums don’t really attest to an area’s cultural history – zoos, for instance, take great pains to ensure that animals from other parts of the globe are represented as well as they can be in a foreign setting. So asking “what is a museum?” is a tough question to answer! I’ll admit that I thought ICOM changing their definition of what a museum is was kind of silly and pointless, the same as the Australian gentleman did. However, the more stories I heard, the more I began to understand that only Euro-centric countries were really questioning why the definition needed to change. The Russian museum curator’s story really stuck with me, as she was fearful of losing funding to all Russian museums, as the Russian government uses the ICOM definition to provide funding.

My favorite museum in the world (so far) is the National Museum of Scotland, located in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s the type of museum most of us think of as a “typical museum” – a large building with several floors, a large collection of historical and pre-historical objects with significance to the country, as well as a little cafe and a gift shop. (There’s always a little shop at the end.) But there’s also Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness, which although classifies as a bookshop because the items there are for sale, also carries historical artifacts with cultural significance to the country (old books and maps). And then there is the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, UT, which is a zoo, not a museum. But it too has the area’s natural history covered in the form of native plants and animals. There are also libraries, which very often carry historical collections of their own, which by my definition would mean they were museums! I’m therefore finding it extremely difficult to find a good definition that encompasses what a “museum” actually is. I think I’ll have to stick with my original definition, but add that museums are always places of research and learning as well as having collections of objects that reflect historical and/or natural significance to the area. Hopefully, that should cover everything that needs to be included!

Question: What museum is your favorite, and why?