A museum is a place of wonder. Whether it’s exploring the Louvre in Paris or making a tornado in a bottle at an interactive science exhibit, museums have something for everyone. Museums beckon visitors to explore new cultures and topics through carefully curated collections and transcending exhibitions that can change any naysayer’s mind.
Museums are the backbone of a global cultural heritage system and should be able to respond to the needs and challenges of the international community in a way that is responsive, inclusive, and resolutely rooted in the communities they serve. Museums need to embrace the new definition of a museum to become more effective at what they do best: connect people to each other and to their shared heritage through meaningful dialogue, learning, and connections.
For the last three years ICOM has been working on an update to its definition of museum, which was originally established in 1946 and adopted at the next ICOM General Conference in 1951. The most recent version includes the inclusion of intangible heritage. The new definition, which was approved in 2022, defines a museum as “an institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage for purposes of education, enjoyment, recreation, reflection and knowledge sharing.”
This definition, known as ICOM’s “backbone” is meant to be a framework within which ICOM members can build their local institutions. However, there has been resistance to the latest update to the definition and a great deal of confusion about what it means.
There is a sense that this revision to the museum definition is not what many of us wanted or needed. There is also a great deal of frustration with the fact that, in the face of an overwhelming number of comments, ICOM Define was not able to bring a single proposal forward for a vote.
ICOM Define worked hard to include the voices of all of our members. The first round of consultation was the largest outreach project in the history of ICOM and involved speaking with representatives from 126 national committees, which is a significant percentage of ICOM’s 50,000 members worldwide.
The richly varied responses to the definition development process will inform the work of ICOM Define going forward. The results of this consultation will be available for all ICOM member museums to review as they prepare their proposals and participate in the upcoming consultations.
In the days following the vote Seema Rao hosted a lively discussion on Twitter, which you can view here. She was joined by fellow Twitter users and ICOM colleagues who had strong opinions about what is or isn’t a museum.