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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...)

Selected museum

The American Museum of Natural History (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 21 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 32 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. The naturalist Albert S. Bickmore devised the idea for the American Museum of Natural History in 1861, and, after several years of advocacy, the museum opened within Central Park's Arsenal on May 22, 1871. The museum's first purpose-built structure in Theodore Roosevelt Park was designed by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould and opened on December 22, 1877. Numerous wings have been added over the years, including the main entrance pavilion (named for Theodore Roosevelt) in 1936 and the Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

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. The term "curator" may designate the head of any given division, not limited to museums. Curator roles include "community curators", "literary curators", "digital curators", and "biocurators". (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that when the National Museum of Vanuatu opened its new building in 1995, a specially selected pig was sacrificed?
... that the Seabury Tredwell House, now a museum, is Manhattan's only remaining 19th-century house with its original furnishings?
... that the Richard Childress Racing Museum is located in the former team workshop in which Richard Childress Racing won six NASCAR Cup Series championships and 58 races?
... that the now-closed Dinosaur Wildlife museum exhibited three fox squirrels posed to fight in a boxing ring?
... that in 1999 two necklaces were repatriated to the Cook Islands National Museum from a museum in Angus, Scotland?
... that Ukrainian artist Kateryna Antonovych worked at Prague's Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence before the US Army Air Forces bombed it?

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

Selected type of museum

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...)