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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. Compared to a library, a museum hosts a much wider range of objects and usually focus around a specific theme such as the arts, science, natural history, local history, and other topics. Public museums that host exhibitions and interactive demonstrations are often considered to be tourist attractions, and many museums attract large numbers of visitors from outside their host country, with the most visited museums in the world regularly 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 old building with the new wing in 2013

Museum de Oude Wolden (Dutch pronunciation: [myˈzeːjʏm də ˌʔʌudə ˈʋɔldə(n)]; English: Museum The Old Wolds), abbreviated as MOW, is a regional museum in the village of Bellingwolde in the Netherlands. The museum focuses on art and history of the regions of Oldambt and Westerwolde in the east of the province of Groningen.

The museum opened on 10 August 1973. In the first decades, it primarily exhibited historical objects documenting everyday life. In the late 1990s, the museum started to exhibit artworks of artist collective De Ploeg and magic realist painter Lodewijk Bruckman. Since 2012, it has a permanent display of paintings by Bruckman and temporary exhibitions.

The museum is an independent foundation that is mainly funded by the municipality of Bellingwedde. From 2013 to 2016, the museum had around 4,700 visitors per year. It is one of the lesser-visited museums in Groningen. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

A conservator-restorer is a professional responsible for the preservation of artistic and cultural artifacts, also known as cultural heritage. Conservators possess the expertise to preserve cultural heritage in a way that retains the integrity of the object, building or site, including its historical significance, context and aesthetic or visual aspects. This kind of preservation is done by analyzing and assessing the condition of cultural property, understanding processes and evidence of deterioration, planning collections care or site management strategies that prevent damage, carrying out conservation treatments, and conducting research. A conservator's job is to ensure that the objects in a museum's collection are kept in the best possible condition, as well as to serve the museum's mission to bring art before the public. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that during its run of screenings at the Whitney Museum, the 1979 film Asparagus was shown rear-projected onto a set that appears in the film itself?
... that the lobby of Wenzhou Museum includes Kuafu chasing the sun and Chang'e flying to the moon?
... that Max Creutz, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld from 1922, acquired modern art including a painting by Max Ernst and a large collection of Bauhaus creations?
... that Peckham Rock, a fake cave painting surreptitiously installed in the British Museum by Banksy, is actually concrete from Hackney?
... that after Nazi Germany placed anti-aircraft batteries on the property of the Genoa Conservatory, the school moved into the Villa Saluzzo Serra art museum to maintain the safety of its students?
... that curator Nina Tonga is the first Pasifika person to be a contemporary art curator at Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand?

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

Selected type of museum

The Russian *Aurora*, one of the few protected cruisers to be preserved, is one of the world's most visited vessels

A museum ship, also called a memorial ship, is a ship that has been preserved and converted into a museum open to the public for educational or memorial purposes. Some are also used for training and recruitment purposes, mostly for the small number of museum ships that are still operational and thus capable of regular movement.

Several hundred museum ships are kept around the world, with around 175 of them organised in the Historic Naval Ships Association though many are not naval museum ships, from general merchant ships to tugs and lightships. Many, if not most, museum ships are also associated with a maritime museum. (Full article...)