A museum is an institution founded for the collection and interpretation of cultural heritage. This heritage may consist of works of art or of natural history, but the term museum is most commonly used to refer to cultural material relating to human culture and activity. Museums have a long and varied history, springing from what seems to be an innate human desire to collect and interpret material culture.
From their earliest days museums have served a broad range of purposes: as recreational facilities; scholarly venues; educational resources; tourist attractions; centres of national or civic pride; and even as transmitting overtly ideological concepts. The diverse forms and content of museums illustrate the extraordinary diversity of societies’ cultural consciousness.
A basic function of museums, as identified by Noble and reflected in the ICOM definition, is the preservation and interpretation of a certain aspect of that consciousness. This is achieved through the creation of collections and their display, based on a scientific basis, for the benefit of society at large.
Whether the museums are concerned with the artistic and cultural treasures of the world or with the most mundane aspects of human existence, their task is the same: to communicate to the public that there is much more to life than meets the eye. The museum is a place where the magic of discovery is revealed and where the visitor is invited to take an active part in learning.
For some time now the museum has been seen as a complex organism with many overlapping and interdependent functions, including operation (defined as ‘all activities aimed at the physical and financial management of the institution’), curation (which, in the British CC model, includes selection, thesauration and documentation and the research and scholarly output related to those collections) and communication (the presentation of the collections in exhibitions and other services). The development of this twofold model is associated with a process of expansion, specialisation and professionalisation. This led to a clearer division of functional subsystems with a high degree of selfcontainment.
A newer trend is to identify the basic responsibilities of museums in a simpler way. This is exemplified by the five-function definition formulated by Noble:’museums must be able to collect, conserve, study, document and interpret. They form a single entity, like the fingers of a hand; if one is omitted, the whole is handicapped’ (Noble 1970). This idea has been elaborated by the ICOM Define project and is supported by the Advisory Council in its choice for the proposal to be voted on at the Prague Extraordinary General Assembly 2022.