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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 Vatican Museums (Italian: Musei Vaticani; Latin: Musea Vaticana) are the public museums of Vatican City, enclave of Rome. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of the most well-known Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display, and currently employs 640 people who work in 40 different administrative, scholarly, and restoration departments.

Pope Julius II founded the museums in the early 16th century. The Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling and altar wall decorated by Michelangelo, and the Stanze di Raffaello (decorated by Raphael) are on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums, considered among the most canonical and distinctive works of Western and European art.

In 2023, the Vatican Museums were visited by 6.8 million people. They ranked second in the list of most-visited art museums in the world after the Louvre, and third on the list of most-visited museums.

There are 24 galleries, or rooms, in total, with the Sistine Chapel, notably, being the last room visited within the Museum. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

A Collections Management System (CMS), sometimes called a Collections Information System, is software used by the collections staff of a collecting institution or by individual private collectors and collecting hobbyists or enthusiasts. Collecting institutions are primarily museums and archives and cover a very broad range from huge, international institutions, to very small or niche-specialty institutions such as local historical museums and preservation societies. Secondarily, libraries and galleries are also collecting institutions. Collections Management Systems (CMSs) allow individuals or collecting institutions to organize, control, and manage their collections' objects by “tracking all information related to and about” those objects. In larger institutions, the CMS may be used by collections staff such as registrars, collections managers, and curators to record information such as object locations, provenance, curatorial information, conservation reports, professional appraisals, and exhibition histories. All of this recorded information is then also accessed and used by other institutional departments such as “education, membership, accounting, and administration."

Though early Collections Management Systems were cataloging databases, essentially digital versions of card catalogs, more recent and advanced systems are being used to improve communication between museum staff and to automate and manage collections-based tasks and workflows. Collections Management Systems are also used to provide access to information about an institution's collections and objects to academic researchers, institutional volunteers, and the public, increasingly through online methods. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that conservator Carolyn Price Horton helped to direct a "Mud Angel army" that rescued books after the Arno flooded museums and libraries in Florence, Italy, in 1966?
... that the American Pigeon Museum & Library keeps a flock of hundreds of pigeons for public viewing?
... that the Paul Delvaux Museum exhibits not only Paul Delvaux's paintings, but also a collection of model trains?
... that a vampire killing kit was donated to the Mercer Museum in the 1980s?
... that American professor Emerson Charles Denny co-published the Nelson–Denny Reading Test in 1930, which has parts held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History?
... that the only known copies of the oyster dress designed by Alexander McQueen for his collection Irere are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Kim Kardashian?

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 1Aerial 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 2The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
Image 3The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997
Image 4Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
Image 5Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
Image 6The Museum Island, Berlin
Image 7The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
Image 8Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
Image 9The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
Image 10A 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 11The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
Image 12The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
Image 13Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
Image 14The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
Image 15Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum
Image 16Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
Image 17The State Historical Museum, Moscow
Image 18The British Museum, London
Image 19The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
Image 20National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
Image 21The 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 22The 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 23The 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 24Paifang 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 25Small 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 26The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image 27The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.
Image 28São 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

Selected type of museum

A green museum is a museum that incorporates concepts of sustainability into its operations, programming, and facility. Many green museums use their collections to produce exhibitions, events, classes, and other programming to educate the public about the natural environment. Many, but not all, green museums reside in a building featuring sustainable architecture and technology. Green museums interpret their own sustainable practices and green design to present a model of behavior.

Green museums strive to help people become more conscious of the limitations of their world, and how their actions affect their world. The goal is to create positive change by encouraging people to make sustainable choices in their daily lives. They use their position as community-centered institutions to create a culture of sustainability. (Full article...)