Portal:Museums

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The Museums Portal

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...)

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Selected museum

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Main Building

Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Hebrew: מוזיאון תל אביב לאמנות Muzeon Tel Aviv Leomanut) is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. The museum is dedicated to the preservation and display of modern and contemporary art from Israel and around the world. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

Image 1The Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, has the world's largest stained-glass ceiling, designed by Leonard French.
Image 2Entrance hall of the Vienna Technical Museum, one of the largest technology museums in Europe
Image 3The Dinosaur Hall of the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin, showing the skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, among the largest mounted skeletons in the world
Image 4Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, an archaeology and anthropology museum
Image 5Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale
Image 6Antique cuckoo clocks displayed at Cuckooland Museum, Tabley, an example of a specialised museum
Image 7Panoramic view of the library of the Guimet Museum, Paris, an art museum specialising in Asian art
Image 8A museum in Verkhniye Mandrogi, Leningrad Oblast, specialising in vodka
Image 9The Industrial Gallery, housed in the original part of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, designed by Yeoville Thomason and opened in 1885
Image 10Floating Heads by Sophie Cave (2006), installed in the East Court of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Image 11An early 18th-century German Schrank with a traditional display of corals, from the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin
Image 12Display cases in Altena Castle
Image 13The queen's chamber of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, the former residence of Marie Antoinette
Image 14Triangular prism-shaped display cases in the Red Dot Design Museum, Essen
Image 15Old Dutch display case in Branderszaal Lange Haven 97, Schiedam
Image 16The South Hall of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia, an aerospace museum, showing the Enola Gay bomber and other aeroplanes
Image 17Storage gallery of the Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, a museum of pre-Columbian art
Image 18The Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Image 19Exhibit in Indonesia Museum, Jakarta, displaying the traditional costumes of Indonesian ethnic groups
Image 20The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, showing some of its collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities
Image 21Iron bed in torture room at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh
Image 22The Galerie des Glaces of the Palace of Versailles

Selected general article

Heritage science is the interdisciplinary domain of scientific study of cultural and natural heritage. Heritage science draws on diverse humanities, sciences and engineering disciplines. It focuses on enhancing the understanding, care and sustainable use of heritage so it can enrich people's lives, both today and in the future. Heritage science is an umbrella term encompassing all forms of scientific enquiry into human works and the combined works of nature and humans, of value to people.

The above definition was developed though a community consultation organised by ICCROM and the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science in 2019. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that American professor Emerson Charles Denny co-published the Nelson–Denny Reading Test in 1930, which has parts held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History?
... that Hasanpaşa Gasworks escaped its demolition through the resistance of local residents, became a festival venue for a time and was finally transformed into a museum after redevelopment?
... that the world's oldest timepiece with an anchor escapement is in the collection of the Irish Museum of Time?
... that the American Pigeon Museum & Library keeps a flock of hundreds of pigeons for public viewing?
... that while the objects on the Farnese Artemis had initially been identified as female breasts, the museum housing the statue now describes them as bull scrotums?
... that Ukrainian museum director Horpyna Vatchenko forced the Hermitage Museum to abide by its agreement and return the Kernosovskiy idol after a loan?

Get involved

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

Selected exterior image

Image 1A maritime museum located in the village of Bolungarvík, Vestfirðir, Iceland, showing a 19th-century fishing base with a typical boat of the period and associated industrial buildings: an example of a very small museum
Image 2The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
Image 3The Louvre, Paris, showing the glass-and-metal Pyramid, designed by I. M. Pei to act as the museum's main entrance, and completed in 1989
Image 4The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997
Image 5The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
Image 6The Dalí Theatre and Museum, commemorating Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, Catalonia, has a geodesic dome and is decorated with giant eggs.
Image 7The State Historical Museum, Moscow
Image 8Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
Image 9The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
Image 10The Museum Island, Berlin
Image 11Small cloister of the charterhouse of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, built on the site of the Baths of Diocletian; part of the National Roman Museum of Rome
Image 12Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
Image 13Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
Image 14The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
Image 15São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, a 1968 concrete-and-glass structure designed by Lina Bo Bardi, considered a landmark of the city and a major example of modern Brazilian architecture
Image 16The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image 17The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
Image 18Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
Image 19The British Museum, London
Image 20Aerial view of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel's Holocaust memorial; the museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, opened in 2005 and tells the personal stories of ninety Holocaust victims and survivors
Image 21The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
Image 22Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
Image 23National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
Image 24Paifang or arched entrance of the Northern Branch of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, whose collection covers 8,000 years of the history of Chinese art
Image 25The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
Image 26Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum
Image 27The Lower Castle of Ambras Castle, Innsbruck, one of the earliest buildings constructed specifically for use as a museum; it remains a museum displaying its original collections
Image 28The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.

Selected type of museum

A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity, and richness of content. Virtual museums can perform as the digital footprint of a physical museum, or can act independently, while maintaining the authoritative status as bestowed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in its definition of a museum. In tandem with the ICOM mission of a physical museum, the virtual museum is also committed to public access; to both the knowledge systems embedded in the collections and the systematic, and coherent organization of their display, as well as to their long-term preservation. As with a traditional museum, a virtual museum can be designed around specific objects (such as an art museum or a natural history museum), or can consist of online exhibitions created from primary or secondary resources (as, for example in a science museum). Moreover, a virtual museum can refer to the mobile or World Wide Web offerings of traditional museums (e.g., displaying digital representations of its collections or exhibits); or can be born digital content such as, 3D environments, net art, virtual reality and digital art. Often, discussed in conjunction with other cultural institutions, a museum by definition, is essentially separate from its sister institutions such as a library or an archive. Virtual museums are usually, but not exclusively delivered electronically when they are denoted as online museums, hypermuseum, digital museum, cybermuseums or web museums. (Full article...)

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