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The Museums Portal

National Dinosaur Museum, Canberra, Australia

A museum (/mjuːˈziːəm/ mew-ZEE-əm; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these items available for public viewing through displays that may be permanent or temporary. The largest museums are located in major cities throughout the world, while thousands of local museums exist in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas. Museums have varying aims, ranging from the conservation and documentation of their collection, serving researchers and specialists, to catering to the general public. The goal of serving researchers is not only scientific, but intended to serve the general public.

There are many types of museums, including art museums, natural history museums, science museums, local history museums, and children's museums. According to the International Council of Museums (ICOM), there are more than 55,000 museums in 202 countries. (Full article...)

Selected museum

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The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 20 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 35 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than 2,500,000 sq ft (232,258 m²). AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually.

The AMNH is a private 501(c)(3) organization. Its mission statement is: "To discover, interpret, and disseminate—through scientific research and education—knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe." (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

Curator and exhibit designer dress a mannequin for an exhibit.

A curator (from Latin: cura, meaning "to take care") is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular institution and its mission. In recent years the role of curator has evolved alongside the changing role of museums, and the term "curator" may designate the head of any given division. More recently, new kinds of curators have started to emerge: "community curators", "literary curators", "digital curators" and "biocurators". (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that a museum in Sendai was built around a 20,000-year-old campsite?
... that a pair of sealskin-covered high heels by Inuk designer Nicole Camphaug are held in the Bata Shoe Museum of Toronto?
... that visitors to the Museum of Sexual Cultures can make offerings to a statue of Priapus?
... that the Museum of Literature Ireland is branded MoLI in homage to Molly Bloom of James Joyce's Ulysses, of which it holds "Copy No. 1"?
... that the Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust in Madrid was the first Holocaust memorial in Spain when it opened in 2007?
... that when the National Museum of Vanuatu opened its new building in 1995, a specially selected pig was sacrificed?

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 1The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
Image 2Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
Image 3The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
Image 4The 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 5Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
Image 6The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997
Image 7The British Museum, London
Image 8Paifang 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 9Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
Image 10Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
Image 11The 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 12The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.
Image 13The 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 14The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image 15National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
Image 16Aerial 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 17A 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 18The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
Image 19The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
Image 20Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum
Image 21Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
Image 22The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
Image 23The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
Image 24The Museum Island, Berlin
Image 25The State Historical Museum, Moscow
Image 26São 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 27Small 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 28The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest

Selected type of museum

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...)