The museum is a place where people can go to see things that are important in the past and learn about how other cultures lived. It is also a place where people can see different art pieces from around the world and learn about what the artists were trying to say in their paintings or sculptures. Museums are like time machines because they help us travel back in time and see how other people lived hundreds of years ago. They can also teach us about different things that happened in our history like wars and other important events.
A museum is an institution that preserves and interprets the primary tangible evidence of humanity and its environment. The institution differs from a library, with which it has often been compared, in that the items housed in a museum are primarily unique and communicate directly to visitors.
Museums play a crucial role in society as they serve as places where history, culture and heritage are preserved and shared for future generations. They act as a window into the past and present, where we can experience the many facets of our global human heritage, and where diverse communities can come together for learning, dialogue and recreation.
In addition to being a source of knowledge, museums are important to our economies, as they attract tourists and provide a variety of services to their local communities. They are also a space for debate and controversy, where we can find new perspectives on historical events and cultural issues.
Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in museum visits worldwide, as well as a number of new museum openings. According to Statista, the world’s most-visited museums include the Louvre in Paris, which has the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo as its main attractions, and the National Museum of China in Beijing, which is renowned for its vast collection of Chinese art and history.
While museums are important places for education, they are also often perceived as institutions that are “stuffy” and child-like, or even unnecessary. This is partly because of how the old ICOM definition of a museum defined its work, which described museums as “acquiring the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity” and divorced them from their cultural contexts.
This year, ICOM launched a major museum reformulation project and conducted a series of global outreach activities to collect input from its members. The results of the first round of consultation were recently published in a report that was made available to all members through the ICOM Museum Definition Platform (MDP). The methodology, which was approved by the ICOM General Conference in Kyoto, is based on four rounds of consultation, divided into 11 steps with a duration of 18 months. The next step will be to select a proposal that will be brought forward for vote at the ICOM Extraordinary General Assembly in Prague on August 24.