When it comes to defining what a museum is, most people think of a building full of old things that have been collected and cared for by curators. But museums are much more than just buildings and objects, they are places where people visit to learn about the past and explore our world. They are like time machines that allow us to travel through history and discover the different cultures that have lived over the centuries.
Museums have been created for a wide range of purposes; to serve as recreation facilities, scholarly venues, and educational resources; to attract tourists and contribute to local economies; to promote civic pride or nationalistic endeavours, and even to transmit overtly ideological concepts. Despite such diversity, museums reveal remarkable similarities in their form and content.
Since ancient times, individuals and communities have collected objects to preserve them for the future. Such collections often have particular significance for the owners, and some of them were transferred to institutions for public benefit. The term museum emerged in the early modern period to describe such institutions.
The word museum has classical origins: in Greek, mouseion, it meant “seat of the Muses,” designating a philosophical institution or a place of contemplation; in Latin, muzeum, it was used to denote a collection of art objects. As the number of museum collections grew in Europe during the Renaissance, the concept of a museum began to emerge as an organizational structure for the collection and interpretation of historical objects.
Over the years, a variety of definitions for museums have been proposed and debated. The most recent proposal was developed in the framework of a major outreach project undertaken by ICOM—the Standing Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials (MDPP).
A museum is an organization that receives public funding to manage a collection, exhibit it, and share it with the general public. It is run by a board of directors and guided by policies that set standards for the museum’s operations. These policies include a code of ethics, institutional bylaws, and collection management procedures.
Museums can be for-profit or nonprofit. For-profit museums are owned and operated by businesses or private individuals, while nonprofit museums are run by organizations whose goal is to educate the public about their collections and their heritage. While nonprofit museums are not required to disclose their financial statements, for-profit museums must report their profits to federal and state agencies.
The process of developing a new definition for museums was the largest outreach project in Icom’s history. Over an 18-month period, the MDPP reached out to more than 126 Icom’s National Committees and spoke with thousands of museum professionals worldwide. The process was outlined in the methodology, which is available for review by ICOM members. The methodology will help the MDPP distill the outcome of the consultations into a museum definition proposal that will be considered by ICOM’s Extraordinary General Assembly in 2022. To view all of the consultation materials, including a summary of the first round of consultation, click here.