Key Conceptsof Museology

Key Conceptsof Museology
Edited by André Desvalléesand François MairesseWith the assistance of the Musée Royal de Mariemontwww.musee-mariemont.be

And the assistance of the ICOM International Committee for Museology

Cover photos:© 2009 Musée du Louvre / Angèle Dequier© National Heritage Board, Singapore© Auckland Museum© Ningbo Museum© Armand Colin, 2010
ISBN: 978-2-200-25398-1

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
François Mairesse, André Desvallées, Bernard Deloche, Serge
Chaumier, Martin Schärer, Raymond Montpetit, Yves Bergeron,Noémie Drouguet, Jean Davallon

With the participation of:Philippe Dubé, Nicole Gesché-Koning, André Gob, Bruno Brulon
Soares, Wan Chen Chang, Marilia Xavier Cury, Blondine Desbiolles,
Jan Dolak, Jennifer Harris, Francisca Hernandez Hernandez, Diana
Lima, Pedro Mendes, Lynn Maranda, Monica Risnicoff de Gorgas,
Anita Shah, Graciela Weisinger, Anna Leshchenko, all of whom havecontributed to the ICOFOM Symposium in 2009 on this subject orhave read through this document.
Translated from the French version by Suzanne Nash

5

FOREWORD

The development of professional standards is one of the core
objectives of ICOM, particularly in the area of advancement, sharing,and communication of knowledge to the broad-ranging global museum
community, but also to those who develop policies in relation to its
work, to those responsible for managing the legal and social aspectsof its profession, and not least to those to whom it is directed and whoare expected to participate in and beneﬁt from it. Launched in 1993,
under the supervision of André Desvallées, and with the collaborationof François Mairesse from 2005 onwards, the Dictionary of Museology
is a monumental work resulting from many years of research,
interrogation, analysis, revision and debate by ICOM’s International
Committee for Museology (ICOFOM), which is particularly devoted
to the process of developing our comprehension of the practice andtheory of museums and the work that is undertaken within these
institutions daily.
The role, development and management of museums has changed
greatly in the last couple of decades. Museum institutions have become
steadily more visitor-focused and some of the larger museums are
veering more towards a corporate management model in their daily
operations. The museum profession and environment have therefore
inevitably evolved. Countries such as China have seen an unprecedented
increase in their museum presence, but there are equally importantmuseum developments occurring at the micro level, for example
in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). These exciting changes
7

FOREWORD
lead to increasing discrepancies in museum job speciﬁcations andtraining courses across different cultures. In this context, a reference
tool for museum professionals and students of museology is allthe-more essential. Where the ICOM/UNESCO publication Runninga Museum: A Practical Handbook provided museum practitioners witha basic handbook on current museum practice, the Encyclopaedia
Dictionarium should be regarded as a companion piece, providing acomplementary perspective on the theory of museums.
While the challenges of day-to-day work often overwhelm theability of the museum ﬁeld to stop and think about its fundamental
philosophical bases, there is a growing need for functionaries at alllevels to rise to the challenge of bringing clarity and comprehension
to those who question the relevance of the museum to society andits citizens. ICOFOM’s crucial work as encapsulated in the Encyclopaedic Dictionary provides for a cogent, structured deconstruction
and distillation of the core precepts underpinning our work today.
Although the Dictionary presents a predominantly Francophone visionof museology for reasons of linguistic coherence, the terminologies
synthesised herein are comprehended and/or utilised by museologists
in several different cultures. The publication, while not exhaustive,
synthesises decades of knowledge development in a systematic investigation of both the epistemology and etymology of the museum andoffers an in-depth presentation of the primary concepts in Museology
today, with an elegantly pragmatic view of both the historical
redundancies and current contentions, which invest in the growth andexpansion of the profession. ICOFOM, the Dictionary’s editors and its
authors have consistently brought sensibility, perception, rigour andbalance to this task of ‘deﬁning’ and explaining the institution andthe practice.
As an avant première of the complete Encyclopaedic Dictionary,
this brochure has been designed to give access to the widest public
possible, in the context both historical and current, for the derivationand evolution of the various terms that litter the language today. In
the spirit of ICOM’s policy of embracing diversity and promoting
greater inclusion, ICOM anticipates that like the ICOM Code of Ethics
8

FOREWORD
for Museums, its publication will stimulate broad-based debate andcollaboration in its continued updating and revision, rather than being
left on the high shelf. ICOM’s 22nd triennial General Conference,in Shanghai, China is therefore a ﬁtting début for this invaluablereference tool in museology. Bringing together museum professionalsof all nationalities is precisely the type of platform that gives birth
to standards and reference tools such as these for current and future
generations.

Alissandra Cummins
PresidentInternational Council of Museums (ICOM)

9PREFACE

In accordance with the underlying principles of ICOM, the aimof the International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) since its
beginnings in 1977 has been to develop museology as a scientiﬁc andacademic discipline which will foster the development of museums
and the museum profession through research, study, and dissemination of the main currents of museological thinking.
To this end a multidisciplinary working group was created tomake a critical analysis of museological terminology, focusing its
thinking on the fundamental concepts of museology. For nearlytwenty years the Thesaurus Working Group compiled remarkableessays and summaries from its scientiﬁc research. Convinced of theimportance of providing the public with a catalogue of terms constituting fundamental reference material, ICOFOM decided – with thesupport of the International Council of Museums – to introduce thispublication at the ICOM General Conference to be held in Shanghai
in November 2010. The introductory brochure, a summary of each of
the twenty-one essays on a fundamental museological term, will bepresented as a ‘preview’ of the forthcoming Dictionary of Museology inwhich these essays will be published in full, accompanied by a selective
dictionary describing close to 500 words mentioned in them.
I would like to emphasise that this brochure, an introduction to thefar more extensive work, does not pretend to be exhaustive but aims
to permit the reader to differentiate between the concepts that are11

P R E FA C E
covered by each term, to discover new connotations and their links tothe entire museological ﬁeld.
Dr. Vinos Sofka did not work in vain when, in the ﬁrst years of
ICOFOM, he strove to turn this international committee into a forum
for reﬂection and debate on museological theory, able to reﬂect on
its own foundations. Thus the committee’s ongoing intellectual
production, which continues today, has been preserved throughthe annual publication of the ICOFOM Study Series (ISS) which hasenriched the body of museological theory for over thirty years. Theinternational bibliography of all ICOFOM publications is unique andrepresents a faithful picture of the evolution of museological thinking
throughout the world.
From reading the articles in this brochure we can understand theneed to reconsider the theoretical fundamentals of museology froman integrating and pluralistic approach, founded in the conceptual
wealth of each word. The terms presented in this brochure are aclear example of the work of a group of specialists who have beenable to understand and enhance the fundamental structure of thelanguage, our intangible heritage par excellence. The conceptual
reach of museological terminology allows us to appreciate the extent
to which theory and practice are inseparably linked. Wishing to go
beyond beaten paths, the authors introduced their own observations
wherever they needed to draw attention to a speciﬁc characteristic ofa term. They were not trying to build or rebuild bridges, but rather tostart from an examination of other more precise concepts and search
for new cultural meanings which enrich the theoretical foundationsof a discipline as vast as museology, destined to strengthen the role ofmuseums and their professionals worldwide.
In my position as Chair of ICOFOM it is a great honour andpleasure to be present at the launch, through this brochure, of a workthat will soon be a landmark in the vast museological bibliography
produced by the members of ICOFOM from different countries anddisciplines, all united around one common ideal.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all who havegenerously contributed their time and talents to bringing these12

P R E FA C E
fundamental works to life: our friends and colleagues of whom we are
extremely proud:– to ICOM, our guiding organisation, for having understood, thanks
to the responsiveness of its Director General, Mr. Julien Anfruns,
the importance of a project begun long ago and which can now becompleted thanks to his commitment,– to André Desvallées, author of and driving force behind a project
which has gained unexpected and well-deserved importance,– to François Mairesse, who began his trajectory within ICOFOM
in his youth, bringing his gifts as a productive writer and researcher, and who, with André Desvallées, successfully coordinated theactions of the Thesaurus Working Group and completed the editingof this brochure and the Dictionary of Museology.
– to all the internationally renowned authors of the different articles,
museological experts in their respective disciplines,– and ﬁnally to our three translators, whose work has also been scientiﬁc in the translation of specialised terms from French when theirequivalent is not always obvious, either in English or in Spanish…
or in Chinese.
To all those who have contributed, each in their own way, tofulﬁlling a dream that has become a reality, I would like to express mymost sincere gratitude.
Nelly Decarolis
Chair
ICOFOM

13

INTRODUCTION

What is a museum? How do we deﬁne a collection? What is an
institution? What does the term ‘heritage’ encompass? Museum
professionals have inevitably developed answers to questions such asthese, which are fundamental to their work, compiled according totheir knowledge and experience. Do we need to reconsider these? Webelieve so. Museum work shifts back and forth between practice andtheory, with theory regularly being sacriﬁced to the thousand and one
daily tasks. The fact remains, however, that thought is a stimulating
exercise which is also fundamental for personal development and forthe development of the museum world.
The purpose of ICOM, on an international level, and of nationaland regional museum associations more locally, is to develop standards
and improve the quality of the thinking that guides the museum world
and the services that it provides to society, through meetings between
professionals. More than thirty international committees work on thiscollective think tank, each in its speciﬁc sector, producing remarkablepublications. But how can this wealth of thought on conservation, newtechnologies, education, historical houses, management, professions,and more, all ﬁt together? More generally, how is what one might callthe museum ﬁeld organised? These are the questions addressed by the
ICOM International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) since its
foundation in 1977, in particular through its publications (ICOFOM
Study Series) which set out to inventory and synthesise the diversity ofopinions in museology. This is the context in which the plan to make15

INTRODUCTION
a compendium of basic concepts in museology, coordinated by André
Desvallées, was launched in 1992 by Martin R. Schärer, Chairman of
ICOFOM. He was joined eight years later by Norma Rusconi (whosadly passed away in 2007), and by François Mairesse. Over the years
a consensus emerged that we should try to present, in some twenty
terms, a panorama of the varied landscape that the museum ﬁeld
has to offer. This work has gathered momentum over the past few
years. Several preliminary versions of the articles were published (inICOFOM Study Series and in the review Publics & musées, which later
became Culture & musées). We propose here a summary of each ofthese terms, presenting different aspects of each concept in condensed
form. These are addressed and further developed in the articles
of about ten to thirty pages each, along with a dictionary of about
400 terms, which will appear in the Dictionary of Museology now being
prepared for publication.
The project to compile the Dictionary is based on an international
vision of the museum, fuelled by many exchanges within ICOFOM.
The authors come from French-speaking countries, for reasons of
linguistic coherence: Belgium, Canada, France, Switzerland. Theyare Yves Bergeron, Serge Chaumier, Jean Davallon, Bernard Deloche,
André Desvallées, Noémie Drouguet, François Mairesse, RaymondMontpetit and Martin R. Schärer. A ﬁrst version of this work waspresented and discussed at length at the 32nd symposium of ICOFOM
in Liège and Mariemont (Belgium) in 2009.
Two points are worthy of brief discussion at this point: thecomposition of the editorial committee and the choice of the twentyone terms.
The French -speaking museal worldin the ICOM dialogue

Why did we choose a committee with almost exclusively French
speakers? Many reasons explain this choice, most but not all ofthem practical ones. We know that the idea of an international andperfectly harmonious collective work is a utopian vision, when not
16INTRODUCTION
everyone shares a common language (scientiﬁc or not). The international committees of ICOM are well aware of this situation, which, toavoid the risk of a Babel, leads them to favour one language – English– today’s lingua franca. Naturally, the choice of the smallest common
denominator works to the beneﬁt of those who master the language,often to the detriment of many others less familiar with the tongueof Shakespeare, who are forced to present their thoughts only in a
caricatured version. Using one of the three ICOM languages (English,
French and Spanish) was unavoidable, but which one? The nationalityof the ﬁrst contributors, under the direction of André Desvallées(who had worked for many years with Georges Henri Rivière, the ﬁrst
Director of ICOM and the founder of French museology) quickly led
to the selection of French, but there were other arguments in its favour.
Most of the contributors can read if not all three, then at least two of
the ICOM languages, even though their command may be far fromperfect. We are familiar with the wealth of Anglo-American contributions in the museum ﬁeld, but we must point out that most of theseauthors – with some notable exceptions, such as the emblematic ﬁguresof Patrick Boylan and Peter Davis, read neither French nor Spanish. The
choice of French in connection, we hope, with a fairly good knowledgeof foreign literature, allowed us to embrace, if not all contributionsin the museum ﬁeld then at least some of its aspects, which are notgenerally explored but which are very important for ICOM. We are,however, aware of the limits of our research and hope that this work
will inspire other teams to present, in their own language (German or
Italian, for example), a different approach to the museum ﬁeld.
On the other hand, the choice of a language has consequences
for the structuring of thought – as illustrated by a comparison of thedeﬁnition of the museum by ICOM in 1974 and in 2007, the ﬁrst being
originally drafted in French, the second in English. We are awarethat this volume would not have been the same in Spanish, English or
German, both on the level of its structure and in its choice of terms,
but there would also have been a certain theoretical bias! It is not
surprising that most practical guides about museums are written
in English (such as the excellent manual edited by Patrick Boylan
17INTRODUCTION
Running a Museum: A Practical Handbook1), while they are much rarer
in France or in the old eastern European countries, which favour essay
writing and developing thought and theory.
It would nevertheless be too caricatural to divide museum
literature into a practical component, strictly Anglo-American, and atheoretical component, closer to the Latin way of thinking: the numberof theoretical essays written by Anglo-Saxon thinkers in museum
literature completely contradicts this picture. The fact remains thata number of differences exist, and differences are always enriching tolearn and to appreciate. We have tried to take this into consideration.
Finally it is important to pay tribute, through the choice of theFrench language, to the fundamental theoretical work continued formany years by the ﬁrst two directors of ICOM, Georges Henri Rivièreand Hugues de Varine, without whom a large part of the museum
work in continental Europe and in the Americas and Africa could not
be understood. A fundamental reﬂection on the museum world cannot
overlook its history, just as it must keep in mind that its origins wereanchored in the Enlightenment and that its transformation (that is its
institutionalisation) occurred at the time of the French Revolution, butalso that the theoretical foundations were laid on the other side of the
Berlin wall during the 1960s when the world was still divided into two
antagonistic blocs. Although the geopolitical order was completely
overturned nearly a quarter of a century ago, it is important thatthe museum sector should not forget its own history – this would be
absurd for an instrument that passes culture on to the public and to
future generations! However, there is still a risk of a very short memory
which retains from museum history only how to run such institutions
and how to attract visitors…
A constantly evolving structure

Right from the start it was not the authors’ aim to write a ‘deﬁnitive’treatise about the museum world, an ideal theoretical system cut off
1. BOYLAN P. (coord.), Running a Museum: A Practical Handbook, Paris, ICOM/Unesco, 2004.
http//:unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001410/141067e.pdf (accessed: June 2010).

18

INTRODUCTION
from reality. The relatively modest formula of a list of twenty-one
terms was chosen to try to mark out a continuum of thought on themuseum ﬁeld with only so many waymarks. The reader will not be
surprised to ﬁnd here a number of familiar terms in common use,such as museum, collection, heritage, public, but we hope he will
discover some meanings and aspects of these which are less familiar.
He may be surprised not to ﬁnd certain other terms, such as ‘conservation’, which is examined under ‘preservation’. We have not, however,taken up all the developments that have been made by the membersof the International Committee for Conservation (ICOM-CC), whose
work extends far beyond our pretensions in this ﬁeld. Other moretheoretical terms may seem somewhat exotic to museum practitioners
at ﬁrst sight: museal, musealisation, museology, etc. Our aim was topresent the broadest view possible of what can be observed in themuseum world, including some common and some more unusual
practices likely to have a considerable impact on the future of museumsin the long term, for example the concept of virtual museums andcyber museums.
Let us ﬁrst set out the limits of this work: we are proposing atheoretical and critical reﬂection on museum work in its broad sense,
which goes beyond traditional museums. We can of course begin withmuseum and try to deﬁne it. In the ICOM deﬁnition of museum, it is an
institution at the service of society and its development. What do these
two fundamental terms mean? But above all – and museum deﬁnitions
do not immediately answer this question – why do museums exist? Weknow that the museum world is linked to the concept of heritage, but it
is far larger than this. How can we suggest this wider context? By theconcept of museal (or the museal ﬁeld), which is the theoretical ﬁeld
dealing with these issues, in the same way that politics are the ﬁeld ofpolitical reﬂection, etc. The critical and theoretical examination of themuseal ﬁeld is museology, whereas the practical aspect is museography.
For each one of these terms there are often not one but several
deﬁnitions which have altered over time. The different interpretationsof each of these terms are examined here.
19

INTRODUCTION
The museum world has evolved a great deal over the years, bothin terms of its functions and through its materiality and the mainelements upon which its work is built. In practical terms, museums
work with objects which form their collections. The human element
is obviously fundamental to understanding the way museums work,
as much for the staff working within the museum – the professionals,
and their relation to ethics – as for the public for whom the museum
is intended. What are the functions of museums? They carry out
an activity that can be described as a process of musealisation andvisualisation. More generally, we speak of museal functions, whichhave been described in different ways over time. We have based our
research on one of the best known models, crafted at the end of the
1980s by the Reinwardt Academie in Amsterdam, which recognises
three functions: preservation (which includes the acquisition, conservation and management of collections), research and communication.
Communication itself includes education and exhibition, undoubtedly
the two most visible functions of museums. In this regard it seemed tous that the educational function had grown sufﬁciently over the pastfew decades for the term mediation to be added to it. One of the majordifferences that struck us between earlier museum work and today is
the growth in the importance attached to notions of management, so
we thought that because of its speciﬁcities, it should be treated as a
museum function. The same is probably true for museum architecture,
which has also grown in importance to the point where it sometimes
upsets the balance between other museum functions.
How does one deﬁne a museum? By a conceptual approach(museum, heritage, institution, society, ethics, museal), by theoreticaland practical considerations (museology, museography), by its functions(object, collection, musealisation), through its players (professionals,
public), or by the activities which ensue from it (preservation, research,communication, education, exhibition, mediation, management,architecture)? There are many possible points of view which have to
be compared to better understand the museum phenomenon, which is
rapidly developing, the recent evolutions of which cannot leave anyone
indifferent.
20

INTRODUCTION
In the early 1980s the museum world experienced a wave of
unprecedented changes: having long been considered elitist andunobtrusive, museums were now, as it were, coming out, ﬂaunting ataste for spectacular architecture, mounting large exhibitions that were
showy and hugely popular and intending to become part of a certainstyle of consumerism. The popularity of museums has not failed since,
and they have doubled in number in the space of little more than ageneration, while astonishing new building projects spring up from
Shanghai to Abu Dhabi, at the dawn of the new geopolitical changes
promised in the future. One generation later the museum ﬁeld isstill changing. Even if homo touristicus seems to have replaced thevisitor as the main target of museum marketing, we can still wonder
about their prospects and ask: is there still a future for museums as
we know them? Is the civilisation of material goods crystallised bymuseums undergoing radical change? We cannot claim to answer
such questions here, but we hope that those who are interested in the
future of museums in general or, more practically, in the future of theirown institution, will ﬁnd in these few pages some elements which mayenrich their thoughts.
François Mairesse and André Desvallées

21

A
ARCHITECTURE
n.–Equivalent in French: architecture; Spanish: arquitectura; German: Architektur; Italian: architettura; Portuguese: arquitectura(Brazil: arquitetura).

(Museum) architecture is deﬁned as
the art of designing and installingor building a space that will be used
to house speciﬁc museum functions,more particularly the functions of
exhibition and display, preventive
and remedial active conservation,
study, management, and receiving
visitors.
Since the invention of the modern
museum, from the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th,
while old heritage buildings werealso being reconverted for museum
use, a speciﬁc architecture evolvedthat was linked to the requirements ofpreserving, researching and communicating collections through permanent or temporary exhibitions. Thisarchitecture is evident in the earliest
museum buildings as much as in themost contemporary ones. The architectural vocabulary has itself inﬂuenced the development of the idea of themuseum. Thus the form of the temple
with a cupola and columned portico
became established along with thegallery, conceived as one of the mainmodels for ﬁne arts museums, andby extension gave rise to the names
gallery, galerie, galleria, and Galeriein France, Italy and Germany and in
Anglo-American countries.
Although the form of museum
buildings was often focused on safeguarding collections, it evolved as
new functions in museum work weredeveloped. So it was that after seeking solutions for better lighting of
the exhibits (Soufﬂot, Brébion, 1778;
J.-B. Le Brun, 1787), for distributing
the collections better throughout themuseum building (Mechel, 17781784), and for structuring the exhibition space better (Leo von Klenze,
1816-1830), at the beginning of the20th century museum people realisedthat the permanent exhibitions must
be reduced. To this end they createdstorage areas, either by sacriﬁcing
exhibition rooms or by creating spacein the basement, or by building new
structures. In addition, every effort
was made to make the setting forthe exhibits as neutral as possible –even if this meant sacriﬁcing all orpart of the existing historical décor.
The invention of electricity greatly
facilitated these improvements andallowed the lighting systems to becompletely revised.
23

New functions that emerged in
the second half of the 20th century
led to major architectural changes:
the increase in the number of temporary exhibitions led to a different
distribution of collections between
the permanent exhibition and storage spaces; the development of visitor facilities, educational workshops
and rest areas, in particular the creation of large multi-purpose spaces;
the development of bookshops, restaurants and shops for selling items
relating to the exhibitions. But at thesame time, the decentralisation byregrouping and by subcontractingsome museum operations required
the building or installation of specialised autonomous buildings: ﬁrstly,
restoration workshops and laboratories which could specialise while serving several museums, then storage
areas located away from the exhibition spaces.
The architect is the person who
designs and draws the plans forthe building and who directs its
construction. More broadly speaking, the person who designs theenvelope around the collections,the staff and the public. Seen fromthis perspective, architecture affects
all the elements connected with thespace and light within the museum,aspects which might seem to be of
secondary importance but which
prove to be determining factors forthe meaning of the display (arrangement in chronological order, visibility
from all angles, neutral background,etc.). Museum buildings are thus
24

designed and built according to anarchitectural programme drawn up
by the scientiﬁc and administrative
heads of the establishment. However, the decisions about deﬁnition of
the programme and the limits of thearchitect’s intervention are not always
distributed in this way. Architecture,
as art or the method for building andinstalling a museum, can be seen as
a complete oeuvre, one that integrates the entire museum mechanism.
This approach, sometimes advocatedby architects, can only be envisaged
when the architectural programme
encompasses all the museographicalissues, which is often far from being
the case.
It can happen that the programmes given to the architects include
the interior design, allowing thelatter – if no distinction is madebetween the areas for general use
and those for museographical use– to give free rein to their ‘creativity’, sometimes to the detriment of
the museum. Some architects havespecialised in staging exhibitions
and have become stage designers or
exhibition designers. Those who cancall themselves ‘museographers’, or
specialists in museum practice are
rare, unless their practices include
this speciﬁc type of competence.
The present difﬁculties of museum
architecture lie in the conﬂict which
logically exists between, on the one
hand, the ambitions of the architect(who will ﬁnd himself in the spotlight due to the international visibilityof this type of building today), and on

the other hand, the people connectedwith the preservation and displayingof the collections; ﬁnally, the comfortof the different visitors must be taken
into account. This issue has alreadybeen highlighted by the architect
Auguste Perret: “For a ship to ﬂoat,
should it not be designed quite differently from a locomotive? The speciﬁcity of the museum building falls tothe architect, who will be inspired by
its function to create the organism.”(Perret, 1931). A look at present dayarchitectural creations shows that,even if most architects take the requirements of the museum programme
into consideration, many continue tofavour the beautiful object over the
excellent tool.
Z DERIVATIVES: ARCHITECTURAL PROGRAMME.
CORRELATED: DÉCOR, EXHIBITION DESIGN,)INTERIOR DESIGNER, LIGHTING, MUSEOGRAPHICPROGRAMME, MUSEOGRAPHY.

25

C
COLLECTION
n. – Equivalent in French: collection; Spanish:colección; German: Sammlung, Kollektion; Italian: collezione, raccolta; Portuguese: colecçāo(Brazil: coleçāo).

Generally speaking, a collection
may be deﬁned as a set of material
or intangible objects (works, artefacts, mentefacts, specimens, archive
documents, testimonies etc.) which
an individual or an establishment
has assembled, classiﬁed, selected,
and preserved in a safe setting andusually displays to a smaller or larger
audience, according to whether thecollection is public or private.
To constitute a real collection,these sets of objects must form a(relatively) coherent and meaningfulwhole. It is important to distinguishbetween a collection and a fonds, anarchival term referring to a collection from a single source, which differs from a museum collection by its
organic nature, and indicates archival
documents of all kinds which havebeen “automatically gathered, created and/or accumulated and used bya physical person or a family in its
activities or its functions.” (Bureau
of Canadian Archivists, 1992). In
the case of a fonds, unlike a museum
collection, there is no selection and26

rarely any intention to build a coherent whole.
Whether material or intangible, a collection is at the heart ofthe museum’s activities. “Museums
have a duty to acquire, preserveand promote their collections as acontribution to the safeguarding of
the natural, cultural and scientiﬁc
heritage” (ICOM Code of Ethics,
2006, article 2). Without saying as
much explicitly, ICOM’s deﬁnitionof a museum remains essentially tied
to this principle, conﬁrming Louis
Réau’s long-standing opinion: “Weunderstand that museums are madefor collections and that they must be
built as it were from inside to outside, shaping the container according
to the content” (Réau, 1908). This
concept no longer corresponds tosome models of museums which do
not own collections, or which havecollections that are not at the heartof their scientiﬁc work. The concept
of collection is also one of those mostwidely used in the museum world,even if we have favoured the notionof ‘museum object’, as will be seen
below. However, one can enumerate
three possible connotations of thisconcept, which varies according to
two factors: on the one hand, theinstitutional nature of the collection,and on the other hand, the material
or intangible nature of the collection
media.
1. Frequent attempts have been
made to differentiate between amuseum collection and other types ofcollection because the term ‘collection’is so commonly used. Generally
speaking (since this is not the casefor every museum) the museum
collection – or the museum collections – are both the source andthe purpose of the activities of themuseum perceived as an institution.
Collections can thus be deﬁned as“the collected objects of a museum,acquired and preserved because of
their potential value as examples, as
reference material, or as objects ofaesthetic or educational importance”(Burcaw, 1997). We can thus referto the museum phenomenon as theinstitutionalisation of a private collection. We must note, however, that
if the curator or the museum staff
are not collectors, collectors havealways had close ties with curators.
Museums should have an acquisition
policy – as emphasised by ICOM,
which also mentions a collection
policy – museums select, purchase,
assemble, receive. The French verb
collectionner is rarely used because it
is too closely linked to the actions of
the private collector and to its derivatives (Baudrillard, 1968), that is tosay collectionism and accumulation,
known pejoratively as ‘collectionitis’.
From this perspective the collection
is seen as both the result and thesource of a scientiﬁc programme,
the purpose of which is acquisition
and research, beginning with thematerial and the intangible evidenceof man and his environment. This
criterion, however, does not differentiate between the museum andthe private collection, in so far as
the latter can be assembled with ascientiﬁc objective, even though themuseum may acquire a private collection which has been built withvery little intention to serve science.
This is when the institutional natureof the museum dominates when
deﬁning the term. According to Jean
Davallon, in a museum “the objects
are always parts of systems and categories” (Davallon, 1992). Amongthe systems relating to a collection,
besides the written inventory which
is a basic requirement of a museum
collection, it is just as essential toadopt a classiﬁcation system which
describes and can also rapidly ﬁ nd
any item among the thousands or
millions of objects (taxonomy, forexample, is the science of classifying
living organisms). Modern classiﬁcation systems have been greatly
inﬂuenced by information technology, but documenting collections
remains an activity requiring speciﬁc and rigorous knowledge, basedon building up a thesaurus of terms
describing the relations between the
different categories of objects.
2. The deﬁnition of collection canalso be viewed from a more generalperspective to include private collectors and museums, but taking
27its assumed materiality as a starting
point. Since this collection is madeof material objects – as was the casevery recently for the ICOM deﬁnition of museums – the collection is
identiﬁed by the place where is located. Krysztof Pomian deﬁnes thecollection as “any group of natural
or artiﬁcial objects that are held temporarily or permanently outside thecircuit of economic activity, subject
to special protection in an enclosed
place designed for this purpose, anddisplayed on view” (Pomian, 1987).
Pomian thus deﬁnes the collection
by its essentially symbolic value, inso far as the object has lost its usefulness or its value as an item forexchange and has become a carrierof meaning (“semiophore” or carrierof signiﬁcance). (see Object).
3. The recent development ofmuseums – in particular the recognition of intangible heritage – hasemphasised the more general natureof collections while also raising newchallenges. Intangible collections (traditional knowledge, rituals and mythsin ethnology, ephemeral gestures andperformances in contemporary art)
have led to the development of new
systems for acquisition. The material
composition of objects alone sometimes becomes secondary, and the
documentation of the collecting process – which has always been important in archaeology and ethnology– now becomes the most important
information. This information is not
only part of research, but also partof communicating to the public.
28

Museum collections have always
appeared relevant provided that they
are deﬁned in relation to the accompanying documentation, and also
by the work that results from them.
This evolution has led to a muchwider meaning of the collection as
a gathering of objects, each preserving its individuality, and assembled
intentionally according to a speciﬁc
logic. This latter meaning, the mostopen, includes toothpick collections
accumulated as well as traditional
museum collections, but also collections of oral history, memories orscientiﬁc experiments.
Z DERIVATIVES: COLLECT, COLLECTION, COLLECTOR,
COLLECTION MANAGEMENT.
CORRELATED: ACQUISITION, CATALOGUE,)CATALOGUING, CONSERVATION, DEACCESSION,
DOCUMENTATION, EXHIBIT, EXHIBITION, PRESERVATION,RESEARCH, RESTORATION, RETURN, RESTITUTION, STUDY.

COMMUNIC ATION
n. – Equivalent in French: communication;
Spanish: comunicación; German: Kommunikation; Italian: communicazione, Portuguese:communicaçāo.

Communication (C) is the actionof conveying information between
one or several emitters (E) and one
or several receivers (R) through achannel (the ECR model, Lasswell1948). The concept is so general that
it is not limited to human processesof bearing information of a semantic
nature, but is also encountered inrelation to machines and to animals
or social life (Wiener 1949). The

term has two usual connotations
which can be found to different
degrees in museums, according towhether the phenomenon is reciprocal (E ↔ C ↔ R) or not (E → C → R).
In the ﬁrst case the communication
is called interactive, while in thesecond it is unilateral and spreadout in time. When communication isunilateral and operates in time, andnot just in space, it is called transmission (Debray, 2000).
In the museum context communication emerges both as the presentation of the results of researchundertaken into the collections(catalogues, articles, conferences,
exhibitions) and as the provision of
information about the objects in thecollections (the permanent exhibition and the information connectedwith it). This interpretation sees theexhibition both as an integral partof the research process and as anelement in a more general communication system including for example, scientiﬁc publications. This is
the rationale which prevailed in the
PRC (Preservation–Research–Communication) system proposed by the
Reinwardt Academie in Amsterdam,
which includes under communication the functions of exhibition,
publication, and education fulﬁlled
by the museum.
1. Application of the term ‘communication’ to museums is not
obvious, in spite of the use made of
it by ICOM in its deﬁnition of themuseum until 2007. This deﬁnition
states that a museum “acquires,conserves, researches, communicatesand exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its
environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.” Until
the second half of the 20th century
the principle function of a museum
was to preserve amassed culturalor natural treasures, and possibly
to display these, without explicitly
expressing any intention to communicate, that is to convey a message
or information to a receiving public.
If in the 1990s, people were asking
themselves whether the museum
was really a medium (Davallon,
1992; Rasse, 1999) this was because
the museum’s communication function did not appear obvious to everyone. On the one hand, the idea of amuseum message appeared only relatively late, with thematic exhibitions
that were principally aimed at education; on the other hand, the receiving
public remained a great unknown
for a long time, and it is only quite
recently that museum visitor studies
and visitor surveys have developed.
Seen from the perspective favouredin the ICOM deﬁnition of museums,
museum communication would
appear to be the sharing, with different publics, of the objects in the collection and the information resulting
from research into them.
2. We can deﬁne the speciﬁcity
of communication as practised bymuseums in two points: (1) it is mostoften unilateral, that is, without thepossibility of reply from the receiving public, whose extreme passivity
was rightly emphasised by McLuhan
and Parker (1969, 2008). This does29not mean that the visitor is not personally involved (whether interactively
or not) in this type of communication(Hooper-Greenhill, 1991); (2) it is notessentially verbal, nor can it really becompared with reading a text (Davallon, 1992), but it works through thesensory presentation of the objects
exhibited: “The museum as a communication system, then, depends
on the non-verbal language of theobjects and observable phenomena.
It is primarily a visual language, andat times an aural or tactile language.
So intense is its communicative powerthat ethical responsibility in its use
must be a primary concern of themuseum worker” (Cameron, 1968).
3. More generally speaking, communication gradually became thedriving force of museum operations
towards the end of the 20th century.
This means that museums communicate in a speciﬁc way (using their own
methods), but also by using all othercommunication techniques, possiblyat the risk of investing less in what
is most central to their work. Many
museums – the largest ones – havea public relations department, or a“public programmes department”,
which develops activities aimed atcommunicating to and reachingvarious sectors of the public that are
more or less targeted, and involving
them through traditional or innovative activities (events, gatherings,
publications, extramural activities,etc.), In this context the very large
sums invested by museums in theirinternet sites are a signiﬁcant part ofthe museum’s communication logic.
30

Consequences include the many digital exhibitions or cyber-exhibitions(a ﬁeld in which a museum may havegenuine expertise), on-line catalogues, more or less sophisticateddiscussion forums, and forays intosocial networks (YouTube, Twitter,
Facebook, etc.).
4. The discussion regarding thecommunication methods used by themuseum raises the question of transmission. The chronic lack of interactivity in museum communication has
led us to ask ourselves how we canmake the visitor more active, while
seeking his participation (McLuhan
and Parker 1969, 2008). We could,of course, remove the labels or eventhe story line so that the public could
build their own rationale as they
move through the exhibition, but
this would not make the communication interactive. The only places
where a degree of interactivity has
been developed (such as the Palais dela Découverte, the Cité des sciences etde l’industrie in Paris, or the Exploratorium in San Francisco) seem closer to amusement parks that develop
fun attractions. It appears nevertheless that the real task of the museum
is closer to transmission, understoodas unilateral communication overtime so that each person can assimilate the cultural knowledge which
conﬁrms his humanity and places
him in society.
CORRELATED: CULTURAL ACTION, EXHIBITION,)EDUCATION, DISSEMINATION, INTERPRETATION, MEDIA,
MEDIATION, TRANSMISSION, PUBLIC AWARENESS, PUBLIC
RELATIONS.

EEDUC ATION
n. (Latin: educatio, educere, to guide, to leadout of) – Equivalent in French: éducation; Spanish: educación; German: Erziehung, Museumspädagogik; Italian: istruzione; Portuguese:
educaçāo.

Generally speaking, education means
the training and development of
human beings and their capacities byimplementing the appropriate means
to do so. Museum education can bedeﬁned as a set of values, concepts,
knowledge and practices aimed atensuring the visitor’s development;
it is a process of acculturation which
relies on pedagogical methods, development, fulﬁlment, and the acquisition of new knowledge.
1. The concept education should bedeﬁned in relation to other terms, theﬁrst of these being instruction, which“concerns the mind and is understood as knowledge acquired by which
one becomes skilful and learned”(Toraille, 1985). Education relates
to both the heart and the mind, andis understood as knowledge which
one aims to update in a relationshipwhich sets knowledge in motion todevelop understanding and individual reinvestment. Education is theaction of developing moral, physical,
intellectual and scientiﬁc values, andknowledge. Knowledge, know-how,being and knowing how to be are four
major components in the educational ﬁeld. The term education comesfrom the Latin “educere”, to lead outof (i.e. out of childhood) which assumes a dimension of active accompaniment in the transmission process.
It is connected with the notion of
awakening, which aims to arousecuriosity, to lead to questioning anddevelop the capacity to think. The
purpose of informal education is thus
to develop the senses and awareness;
it is a development process which presupposes change and transformation
rather than conditioning and inculcation, notions it tends to oppose.
The shaping of it therefore happens
via instruction which conveys useful knowledge, and education whichmakes this knowledge transformableand able to be reinvested by the individual to further the process of his
becoming a human being.
2. In a more speciﬁcally museum
context, education is the mobilisation of knowledge stemming fromthe museum and aimed at the development and the fulﬁlment of individuals, through the assimilation ofthis knowledge, the development of
new sensitivities and the realisation of
new experiences. “Museum pedagogy
31

is a theoretical and methodologicalframework at the service of educational activities in a museum environment, activities the main purpose ofwhich is to impart knowledge (information, skills and attitudes) to thevisitor” (Allard and Boucher, 1998).
Learning is deﬁned as “an act of perception, interaction and assimilationof an object by an individual”, whichleads to an “acquisition of knowledgeor the development of skills or attitudes” (Allard and Boucher, 1998).
Learning relates to the individual
way in which a visitor assimilates the
subject. With regard to the science of
education or intellectual training, if
pedagogy refers more to childhood
and is part of upbringing, the notionof didactic is considered as the theoryof dissemination of knowledge, theway to present knowledge to anindividual whatever his or her age.
Education is wider, and aims at theautonomy of the individual.
We can mention other related
concepts which shade and enrichthese different approaches. The
concepts of museum activities orcultural action, like that of interpretation or mediation, are often invoked
to describe the work carried out withthe public in the museum’s efforts
at transmission. “I am teaching you”
says a teacher, “I am allowing you toknow” says a mediator (Caillet andLehalle, 1995) (see Mediation). Thisdistinction aims to reﬂect the difference between the act of training,
and a process of awareness appealing to an individual who will ﬁnish
32

the work according to the extent
to which he assimilates the content
before him. Training assumes
constraint and obligation, whereas
the museum context supposes freedom (Schouten, 1987). In Germany
the term pedagogy, or Pädagogik isused more frequently, and of theword used to describe education
within museums is Museumspädagogik. This refers to all the activities
that a museum may offer, regardlessof the age, education or social background of the public concerned.
Z DERIVATIVES: ADULT EDUCATION, EDUCATIONALSCIENCES, EDUCATIONAL SERVICES, LIFE-LONG
EDUCATION, INFORMAL OR NON-FORMAL EDUCATION,
MID-CAREER EDUCATION, MUSEUM EDUCATION, POPULAREDUCATION.
CORRELATED: AWAKENING, CULTURAL ACTION,CULTURAL ACTIVITIES, DEVELOPMENT, DIDACTIC,
INTERNSHIP, INSTRUCTION, MEDIATION, PEDAGOGY,
TEACHING, TRAINING, TRANSMISSION, UPBRINGING.

)ETHICSn. (From the Greek ethos: customs, character) – Equivalent French: éthique; Spanish:etica; German: Ethik; Italian: ethica; Portuguese: ética.

Generally speaking, ethics are a philosophical discipline in philosophy
that deals with identifying values
which will guide both private andpublic human conduct. Far frombeing a simple synonym of morality,
as is currently believed, ethics is the
opposite in so far as the choice ofvalues is not imposed by a speciﬁc
set of rules, but rather freely chosen
by the individual taking action. This

distinction is essential because of its
consequences for museums, since
the museum is an institution, that is
to say a phenomenon which exists bycommon agreement and which canbe altered.
Within the museum, ethics canbe deﬁned as the discussion process
aimed at identifying the basic values
and principles on which the work of
the museum relies. Ethics lead to thedrawing up of principles set out inmuseums’ codes of ethics, of which
the ICOM code is one example.
1. Ethics are aimed at guiding a
museum’s conduct. In a moral visionof the world, reality is subject to a
moral order which determines theplace occupied by each person. Thisorder constitutes a perfection towards
which each being must strive by fulﬁlling his function perfectly, and thisis known as virtue (Plato, Cicero,etc.). By contrast, the ethical vision of
the world is based on a chaotic anddisorganised world, left to chance
and without any ﬁxed bearings.
Faced with this universal disorder,
individuals are the only judge of what
is best for them (Nietzsche, Deleuze);
they alone must decide for themselves what is good or bad. Between
these two radical positions that are
moral order and ethical disorder, a
middle road is conceivable in so far
as it is possible for people to agree
freely among themselves to recognisecommon values (such as the principleof respect for human beings). Again
this is an ethical point of view whichon the whole governs the way modern

democracies determine values. This
fundamental distinction still inﬂuences the division between two typesof museums or two ways of operatingeven today. Some very traditional
museums such as ﬁne arts museums
seem to follow a pre-establishedorder: their collections appear tobe sacred and deﬁne a model of
conduct by different actors (curatorsand visitors), and a crusading spirit
in the way they carry out their tasks.
On the other hand, some museums,
perhaps more attentive to the practical reality of people’s lives, do notconsider themselves subject to absolute values and continuously reassess them. These may be museums
more in touch with real life, suchas anthropology museums, striving
to grasp an ethnic reality which isoften ﬂuctuating, or so-called “social
museums” for which questions andpractical choices (political or social)are more important than the religionof collections.
2. While the distinction between
ethical and moral is quite clear in
French and Spanish, the term inEnglish is more open to confusion(éthique in French can be translated as ethic or also as moral in
English). Thus the English versionof the ICOM Code of Ethics (2006)
in appears in French as Code dedéontologie (Código de deontología
in Spanish). The vision expressed in
the code is, however clearly prescriptive and normative (and very similar
to that expressed in the codes of the
UK Museums Association and the33

American Association of Museums).
It is laid out in eight chapters which
identify basic measures to allow the(supposedly) harmonious development of the museum institution
within society: (1) Museums takecare of the protection, documentation and promotion of the naturaland cultural heritage of humanity(institutional, physical and ﬁnancial
resources needed to open a museum).
(2) Museums which maintain collections hold them in trust for the beneﬁt of society and its development(issues of acquisition and deaccessionof collections). (3) Museums hold primary evidence for building up andfurthering knowledge (deontology of
research or of collecting evidence).
(4) Museums provide opportunities
for the appreciation, understanding
and management of the natural andcultural heritage (deontology of exhibiting). (5) Museums hold resourcesthat provide opportunities for otherservices and beneﬁts to the public(issues of expertise). (6) Museums
work in close collaboration withthe communities from which theircollections originate as well as withthose that they serve (issues of cultural property). (7) Museums operate
in a legal manner (respect for therule of law). (8) Museums operate ina professional manner (professional
conduct and conﬂicts of interest).
3. The third impact on museumsof the concept of ethics is its contribution to the deﬁnition of museology
as museal ethics. From this perspective, museology is not a science34

in development (as proposed by
Stránský), because the study of thebirth and the evolution of museums
does not follow the methods of bothhuman and natural sciences in so far
as it is an institution that is malleable and can be reshaped. However,as a tool of social life, museums
demand that endless choices are
made to determine the use to which
they will be put. And precisely here,
the choice of the ends to which thisbody of methods may be subjected
is none other than a choice of ethics.
In this sense museology can be deﬁned as museal ethics, because it is
ethics which decide what a museum
should be and the ends to which it
should be used. This is the ethicalcontext in which it was possible for
ICOM to build a deontological codefor the management of museums,
a deontology which constitutes acode of ethics common to a socioprofessional category and serving it
as a paralegal framework.

) CORRELATED: MORAL, VALUES, DEONTOLOGY.
EXHIBITION
n. (early 15c., from O.Fr. exhibicion, from
Latin exhibitionem, nom. exhibitio, from exhibere ‘to show, display,’ lit. ‘to hold out,’ fromex- ‘out’ and habere ‘to hold’) – Equivalent
French: (from the Latin expositio, gen. espoitionis: exposé, explication) exposition; Spanish: exposición; German: Austellung; Italian:esposizione, mostra; Portuguese: exposição,exhibição.

The term ‘exhibition’ refers to
the result of the action of displaying

something, as well as the whole ofthat which is displayed, and the place
where it is displayed. “Let us consider a deﬁnition of the exhibition
borrowed from outside and not drafted by ourselves. This term – alongwith its abbreviated term ‘exhibit’ –means the act of displaying things to
the public, the objects displayed (theexhibits), and the area where this display takes place” (Davallon, 1986).
Borrowed from the Latin expositio,
the French term exposition (in old
French exposicïun, at the beginningof the 12th century) ﬁrst had at thesame time the ﬁgurative meaning ofan explanation, an exposé, the literal meaning of an exposition (of anabandoned child, still used in Spanish in the term expósito), and thegeneral meaning of display. From
there (in the 16th century) the French
word exposition had the meaningof presenting (merchandise), then(in the 17th century) it could mean
abandonment, initial presentation(to explain a work) or situation (ofa building). In 18th century France
the word exhibition, as a display ofart works, had the same meaning in
French as in English, but the Frenchuse of the word exhibition to refer tothe presentation of art later gave way
to exposition. On the other hand, theword exposition in English means(1) the setting forth of a meaning or
intent, or (2) a trade show, thus preserving the earlier meanings of theFrench. Today both the French exposition and the English exhibition havethe same meaning, which applies tothe setting out of exhibits of all kinds
in a space for public viewing; also theexhibits themselves, and the space inwhich the show takes place. From
this viewpoint, each of these meanings deﬁnes somewhat different
elements.
1. The exhibition, understood as
the container or the place where thecontents are on display (just as themuseum appears both as a function
and as a building) is characterised
not by the architecture of this space
but by the place itself. Even though
the exhibition appears to be one of
the characteristics of museums, exhibition thus has a far broader reachbecause it can also be set up by a
proﬁt-making organisation (market,
store, art gallery). It can be organisedin an enclosed space, but also in the
open air (in a park or a street) or in
situ, that is to say without moving theobjects from their original sites natural, historical or archaeological sites.
Seen from this perspective exhibition areas are deﬁned not only by thecontainer and the contents but also
by the users – visitors and museum
professionals – that is to say the people who enter this speciﬁc area andshare in the general experience of theother visitors at the exhibition. The
place of the exhibition is thus a speciﬁc place of social interaction, theeffects of which can be assessed. Evidence of this is provided by the development of visitor studies, and thegrowth of a speciﬁc ﬁeld of research
connected with the communication
aspect of the place and with all the35interactions speciﬁc to this place, or
to all the images and ideas that thisplace might evoke.
2. As a result of the act of displaying, exhibitions are seen today
as one of the main functions of themuseum which, according to thelatest deﬁnition by ICOM, “acquires,conserves, researches, communicatesand exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity…” According to the PRC model (Reinwardt
Academie), exhibition is part of themuseum’s more general function ofcommunication, which also includes
policies for education and publication. From this point of view exhibitions are a fundamental featureof museums, in so far as these prove
themselves to be excellent places forsensory perception, by presenting
objects to view (that is, visualisation),monstration (the act of demonstrating proof), ostention (initially theholding up of sacred objects for adoration). The visitor is in the presenceof concrete elements which can bedisplayed for their own importance(pictures, relics), or to evoke concepts
or mental constructs (transubstantiation, exoticism). If museums can bedeﬁned as places of musealisationand visualisation, exhibitions thenappear as the “explanatory visualisation of absent facts through objects,
and methods used to display these,used as signs” (Schärer, 2003). Showcases and picture rails are artiﬁces
which serve to separate the realworld and the imaginary world ofmuseums. They serve no other role36

than to mark objectivity, to guarantee distance (creating a distancing,as Bertolt Brecht said of the theatre)
and let us know that we are in another world, a world of the artiﬁcial,of the imaginary.
3. Exhibitions, when they are
understood as the entirety of theobjects displayed, include musealia,
museum objects or “real things”,
along with substitutes (casts, copies,
photos, etc.), display material (display
tools, such as show cases, partitions
or screens), and information tools(such as texts, ﬁlms or other multimedia), and utilitarian signage. From
this perspective the exhibition works
as a speciﬁc communication system(McLuhan and Parker, 1969; Cameron, 1968) based on “real things”
and accompanied by other artefacts
which allow the visitor to better identify their signiﬁcance. In this context,
each of the elements present in the
exhibition (museum objects, substitutes, texts, etc.) can be deﬁned as an
exhibit. In such a situation it is not aquestion of rebuilding reality, whichcannot be relocated in the museum(a “real thing” in a museum is alreadya substitute for reality and an exhibition can only offer images which
are analogous with that reality). The
exhibition communicates reality
through this mechanism. Exhibits inan exhibition work as signs (semiotics), and the exhibition is presented
as a communication process which
is most often unilateral, incomplete
and interpretable in ways that areoften very different. The term exhi-

bition as used here differs from thatof presentation, in so far as the ﬁrst
term corresponds, if not to a discourse, physical and didactic, then atleast to a large complex of items thathave been put on view, whereas thesecond evokes the showing of goods
in a market or department store,
which could be passive, even if inboth cases a specialist (display designer, exhibition designer) is needed
to reach the desired level of quality.
These two levels – presentation andexhibition – explain the difference
between exhibition design and exhibit display. In the ﬁrst case the designer starts with the space and uses
the exhibits to furnish the space,
while in the second he starts withthe exhibits and strives to ﬁnd thebest way to express them, the best
language to make the exhibits speak.
These differences of expression havevaried during different periods,
according to tastes and styles, andaccording to the relative importanceof the people installing the space(decorators, exhibition designers,
display designers, stage designers),
but the modes of exhibition also vary
according to the disciplines and theobjective of the show. The answers
to the questions regarding “to show”
and “to communicate” cover a vastﬁeld allowing us to sketch the history and typology of exhibitions.
We can imagine the media that wereused (objects, texts, moving images,
environments, digital information
technology, mono-media and multimedia exhibitions); according towhether or not the exhibition wasof a proﬁt-making nature (research
exhibition, blockbuster, stage show
exhibition, commercial exhibition),and according to the general conceptof the museographer (exhibit designfor the object, for the point of view orapproach, etc.). And we note that theseeing visitor has become more andmore involved in this great range ofpossibilities.
4. The French words expositionand exhibition differ, in so far as
exhibition now has a pejorative meaning. Towards 1760 the word exhibition could be used in French andin English to indicate an exhibitionof paintings, but the meaning of theword has been degraded in French toindicate activities that are clearly forshow (sport exhibitions), or indecent
in the eyes of the society where theexhibition takes place. This is thecase for the derivatives exhibitionist
and exhibitionism in English, whichrefer even more speciﬁcally to indecent acts. Criticism of exhibitions
is often the most virulent when it
takes the approach that the exhibition is not what it should be – and by
association, what a museum should
do – but has become a hawker show,
far too commercial, or offensive tothe public.
5. The development of new technologies and computer-aided design
have popularised the creation of
museums on the internet with exhibitions that can only be visited onscreen or via digital media. Rather
than using the term virtual exhibi37

tion (the exact meaning of which
would be a possible exhibition, thatis to say a potential reply to the question of “showing”), we prefer theterms digital or cyber exhibition torefer to these particular exhibitions
seen on the internet. They open up
possibilities (collecting objects, newways of display, analysis, etc) thattraditional exhibitions of material
objects do not always have. Whilefor the time being they are hardly
competition for exhibitions of real
objects in traditional museums, it
is not impossible that their development will affect the methods currently used by museums.

38

Z DERIVATIVES: AGRICULTURAL EXHIBITION,
COMMERCIAL EXHIBITION, CYBER EXHIBITION, EXHIBIT,
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE, EXHIBITION CURATOR, EXHIBITIONDESIGN, EXHIBITION DESIGNER, EXHIBITION GALLERIES,EXHIBITION PRACTICE, EXHIBITION SCENARIO, EXHIBITIONSTUDIES, EXHIBITOR, IN SITU EXHIBITION, INTERNATIONAL
EXHIBITION, NATIONAL EXHIBITION, OPEN AIR EXHIBITION,PERMANENT EXHIBITION (A LONG OR SHORT TERM
EXHIBITION), TEMPORARY EXHIBITION, TRAVELLINGEXHIBITION, TO EXHIBIT, UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION.
CORRELATED: COMMUNICATION, DECORATOR,)
DEMONSTRATION, DIDACTIC OBJECT, DIORAMA, DISPLAY,DISPLAY TOOL, EXPOSITION, FAIR, FICTIONAL REALITY,GALLERY, HANGING, INSTALLATION, INSTALLING SPACE,
MEANS, MECHANISM, MEDIA, MESSAGE, METAPHOR,MONSTRATION, OPENING, OSTENTION, PICTURE RAIL,POSTING, PRESENTATION, PROJECT MANAGER, REALITY,
REPRESENTATION, STAGE SETTING, SHOW, SHOWCASE,
SOCIAL SPACE, SPACE, STAGE DESIGN, VISUALISATION.

H
HERITAGE
n. – Equivalent in French: patrimoine; Spanish:
patrimonio; German: Natur- und Kulturerbe;
Italian: patrimonio; Portuguese: patrimônio.

The notion of heritage (patrimonium)in Roman law referred to all theassets received by succession, assets
which, according to law, are inherited by children from fathers andmothers; family assets, as opposed
to assets acquired since marriage. Byanalogy, two metaphorical uses wereborn later. (1) Recently the expression‘genetic heritage’ to describe thehereditary features of a living being;(2) earlier the concept of ‘cultural
heritage’ seems to have appearedin the 17th century (Leibniz, 1690)
before being taken up again by
the French Revolution (Puthod deMaisonrouge, 1790); Boissy d’Anglas, 1794). The term, however, hasmany more or less broad meanings.
Because of its etymology, the term
and the notion that it infers havespread more widely in Romance
languages since the 1930s (Desvallées, 1995) than in the Anglo-Saxon
world, which favoured the term property (goods) before adopting theterm heritage in around the 1950s,
while differentiating it from legacy.
In the same way the Italian govern-ment, while one of the ﬁrst to recognise the term patrimonio, continued
to use the expression beni culturali(cultural goods). The idea of heritageis inevitably tied to that of potential
loss or disappearance – as was thecase after the French Revolution –and at the same time to the will topreserve these goods. “Heritage canbe recognised by the fact that its lossmeans a sacriﬁce and that its conservation also presupposes sacriﬁces”(Babelon et Chastel, 1980).
1. Starting with the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century, heritage essentially referred toimmovable property and was generally confused with the idea of historical monuments. A monument, inthe original sense of the word, is aconstruction intended to perpetuate
the memory of somebody or something. Aloÿs Riegl identiﬁed three
categories of monuments: thosethat were conceived intentionally“to commemorate a speciﬁc time or
a complex event in the past” (intentional monuments), “those chosen
by subjective preferences” (historical monuments), and ﬁnally “all thecreations of mankind, independentof their signiﬁcance or their original intent” (ancient monuments)(Riegl, 1903). According to the prin39

ciples of history, history of art, andarchaeology, the last two categories essentially belong to the category of immovable heritage. Untilvery recently the Directorate of the
Heritage of France, whose principle purpose was the preservation ofhistorical monuments, was separate
from the Directorate of the Museumsof France (French Museums Board).
Today it is not unusual to ﬁnd people supporting this differentiation,
which is at the very least strict. Even
when expanded worldwide under
the aegis of UNESCO, the idea thatis fostered especially by ICOMOS,
the equivalent of ICOM for historical monuments, is ﬁrst of all based
essentially on monuments and ongroups of monuments and sites.
Thus the Convention on the World
Cultural Heritage stipulates: “Forthe purposes of this Convention, thefollowing shall be considered cultural heritage: – monuments: architectural works, works of monumental
sculpture and painting, […] – groupsof buildings: groups of separate orconnected buildings, […] because of
their architecture, […] – sites: worksof man or the combined works ofnature and man, […]. For the purposes of this Convention the following
shall be considered natural heritage:natural features, […] – geologicaland physiographical formations[…] – natural sites or natural areas.”(UNESCO 1972).
2. From the mid 1950s, the notionof heritage gradually incorporated
all material evidence of man and his
environment and became conside40

rably wider. Thus folklore heritage,
scientiﬁc heritage and then industrial
heritage were gradually integrated
into the concept of heritage. The deﬁnition of heritage in French-speaking
Québec also followed this generaltendency: “May be considered heritage all objects or groups of objects,
material or intangible, that are collectively recognised or appropriatedfor their value as evidence and historical memory and which merit being
protected, preserved, and enhanced”(Arpin, 2000). This concept refers to
all natural or man-made goods andvalues, whether material or intangible, without restriction of time orspace, whether they be simply inherited from the forbears of earlier generations or gathered and preserved to
be transmitted to the descendants
of future generations. Heritage is a
public good; its preservation must
be assumed by the community when
individuals fail to do so. Individual
local natural and cultural characteristics contribute to the conception
and building of the universal character of heritage. The concept ofheritage differs from the concept ofinheritance with regard to time andevents: whereas inheritance is identiﬁed immediately after a death orwhen there is a transferral of goods
from one generation to another, heritage deﬁnes all the goods received orgathered and safeguarded by earlier
generations that will be transmitted
to their descendants. To a certain
extent, heritage can be a line of inheritances.

3. For some years the notion of heritage, essentially deﬁned on the basisof a western concept of transmission,
has felt the impact of the globalisationof ideas, such as the relatively recent
concept of intangible heritage. This
concept, of Asian origin (in particular from Japan and Korea) is foundedon the idea that transmission, to beeffective, must essentially be done byhuman carriers, from whence evolved the idea of living human treasures: “Living human treasure refers
to a person who excels above othersin performing music, dance, games,
plays and rituals which are of outstanding artistic and historical value
in their respective countries as envisaged in the Recommendation on the
Safeguarding of Traditional Culturesand Folklore” (UNESCO, 1993).
This principle was accepted internationally and endorsed in the 2003
Convention for the Safeguarding of
the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
“The intangible cultural heritage
means the practices, representations,expressions, knowledge, skills – aswell as the instruments, objects,
artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities,groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural
heritage, transmitted from generation
to generation, is constantly recreatedby communities and groups in response to their environment, theirinteraction with nature and their history, and provides them with a senseof identity and continuity, thus pro-moting respect for cultural diversity
and human creativity. For the purposes of this Convention, consideration
will be given solely to such intangible
cultural heritage as is compatible
with existing international humanrights instruments, as well as withthe requirements of mutual respectamong communities, groups andindividuals, and of sustainable development.” (UNESCO, 2003).
4. Heritage covers a ﬁeld that has
become increasingly complex, and in
the past few years the uncertainties
of its transmission have led to more
focused thinking on the mechanismsof building and extending heritage:
what exactly is the process of heritage building? Much contemporary
research analyses the institution ofheritage building beyond the empirical approach, seeing it as the result ofstrategies and interventions focusedon marking and signals (framing).
Thus the idea of heritage building isnecessary to understand the position
in society that heritage represents,
rather as others speak of the idea of“artiﬁcation” (Shapiro, 2004) withregard to works of art. “Heritage is acultural process or performance thatis concerned with the types of production and the negotiation of cultural identity, individual and collective
memory, and social and culturalvalues” (Smith, 2007). If we accept
that heritage is the result of the founding of a certain number of values,
this implies that these values are thebasis of heritage. These values should
be examined, but also – sometimes –contested.
41

5. The institution of heritage
also has its detractors: people who
question its origins and the abusive‘fetishist’ value attached to the formsof the underlying culture, in thename of western humanism. In thestrictest sense of the word, that is tosay in the anthropological sense, ourcultural heritage is only made up ofvery modest practices and skills. To
a far greater extent it depends on theability to make and use these tools,
especially when these are ﬁxed as
objects inside a museum showcase.
Too often we forget that the most elaborate and powerful tool invented by
man is the concept, the instrumentfor developing thought, which is very
difﬁcult to arrange in a showcase.
Cultural heritage understood as thesum total of the common evidence ofhumankind has been severely criticised for being a new dogma (Choay,1992) in a society which has lost its
religious bearings. It is possible,
moreover, to list the successive stagesof building this recent product: heritage reappropriation (Vicq d’Azyr,
1794), spiritual connotation (Hegel,
1807), mystical, disinterested connotation (Renan, 1882) and ﬁnally,
humanism (Malraux, 1947). The

42

notion of collective cultural heritage,
which only transposes the legal andeconomic lexicon to the moral ﬁeld,
appears suspicious, to say the least,and can be analysed as being part ofthat which Marx and Engels called
ideology, that is to say a by-productof a socio-economic context intended to serve special interests. “Theinternationalisation of the conceptof heritage is […] not only false, but
dangerous in so far as one imposes awhole set of knowledge and prejudices whose criteria are the expressionof values built on aesthetic, moral,
and cultural received ideas, in short
an ideology of a caste in a society
whose structures are not compatible with those of the third world ingeneral and Africa in particular”(Adotevi, 1971). It is all the moresuspect because it coexists with theprivate nature of economic property
and seems to serve as the consolation
prize for the deprived.
Z DERIVATIVES: HERITOLOGY, INHERITANCE.
CORRELATED: COMMUNITY, CULTURAL PROPERTY,)CULTURAL RELIC, EXHIBIT, EVIDENCE, IDENTITY, IMAGE,LEGACY, LIVING HUMAN TREASURE, MATERIAL CULTURE,
MEMORY, MESSAGE, MONUMENT, NATIONAL TREASURE,OBJECT, PATRIMONY, REALITY, SEMIOPHORE (SEEOBJECT) SUBJECT, TERRITORY, THINGS, VALUE, WITNESS.

I
INSTITUTION
n. (From the Latin institutio, convention, setting up, establishment, arrangement). Equivalent in French: institution; Spanish: institución;
German: Institution; Italian: istituzione; Portuguese: instituiçāo.

Generally speaking an institution
indicates a convention established bymutual agreement between people,
being thus arbitrary but also historically dated. Institutions are elementsin the broad range of solutions thatmankind has created to answer the
problems raised by the natural needsof life in a society (Malinowski,1944). More speciﬁcally, institution
refers to an organism that is public or
private, established by society to ﬁll a
speciﬁc need. The museum is an institution in the sense that it is governed by an identiﬁed legal system of
public or private law (see the terms
Management and Public). Whether
it is based on the concept of publictrust (in Anglo-Saxon law) or public
ownership (in France from the Revolution), demonstrates, beyond thedifferences in conventions, a mutual
agreement between the people in asociety, that is to say an institution.
In French, when the term is associated with the general qualiﬁer‘museal’ (institution muséale, in thecommon sense of that which relates to museums) it is often used as asynonym for ‘museum’, most often
to avoid excessive repetition of theword museum. The concept of institution, for which there are three
precise accepted meanings, is nevertheless central to debates regarding
museums.
1. There are two levels of institutions, according to the nature of theneed they are intended to satisfy.
This need may be ﬁrst of all biological (need to eat, to reproduce, tosleep, etc.) or secondly the result of
the demands of living in a society(need for organisation, defence,
health, etc.). These two levels correspond to two types of institutionthat are unequally restrictive: meals,
marriage, lodging on the one hand,
and the State, the army, schools, hospitals, on the other. In so far as theymeet a social need (sensory relation
to objects) museums belong to thesecond category.
2. ICOM deﬁnes museum as a permanent institution in the service ofsociety and its development. In thissense the institution is a construction
created by man in the museal (see thisterm) ﬁeld, and organised in order toenter into a sensory relationship with43

objects. The museum institution,
created and maintained by society,rests on a collection of standards
and rules (preventive conservation,
forbidden to touch objects or display
substitutes while presenting themas originals) which are founded ona value system: preservation of heritage, presentation of works of art
and unique pieces, the disseminationof current scientiﬁc knowledge, etc.
Emphasising the institutional natureof museum thus means strengthening
its normative role and the authority it
has in science and the ﬁne arts, forexample, or the idea that museums
remain “in the service of society andits development.”
3. In contrast to the English, which
does not precisely differentiate
between them (and in general to theway they are used in Belgium and in
Canada too), the terms institution andestablishment are not synonymous.
Museum, as an institution, is different from museum as an establishment, a speciﬁc concrete place: “Themuseal establishment is a concrete
form of the museal institution”(Maroević, 2007). One should notethat questioning of the institution,even purely and simply denying it (asin the case of Malraux’s imaginary
museum or the ﬁctitious museum of
the artist Marcel Broodthaers) does
not mean that it has left the museal
ﬁeld, in so far as the museal ﬁeld can

44extend beyond the institutional framework. In its strict sense, the term
virtual museum (existing in essence
but not in fact) takes account of thesemuseal experiences on the margin of
institutional reality.
This is why in many countries, inparticular in Canada and Belgium,
people use the expression ‘museal
institution’ (institution muséale) to
identify an establishment which
does not have all the characteristics
of a traditional museum. “By museal
institutions, we mean non-proﬁt establishments, museums, exhibition andinterpretation centres which, besides
the functions of acquisition, conservation, research and management ofcollections that some may carry out,
have in common that they are places of education and dissemination
dedicated to the arts, history and thesciences.” (Société des musées québécois, Observatoire de la culture et descommunautés du Québec, 2004).
4. Finally, the term ‘museal institution’ can be deﬁ ned, like ‘ﬁ nancial institution’ (the IMF or theWorld Bank) as all the national orinternational bodies which govern
museum operations, such as ICOMor the former Direction des muséesde France.
Z DERIVATIVES: INSTITUTIONAL, MUSEAL INSTITUTION.
CORRELATED: ESTABLISHMENT, PUBLIC DOMAIN,)
PUBLIC OWNERSHIP, PUBLIC TRUST, VIRTUAL MUSEUM.

M
MANAGEMENT
n. – Equivalent French: gestion; Spanish: gestión; German: Verwaltung, Administration; Italian: gestione; Portuguese: gestāo.

Museum management is deﬁned
today as the action of ensuring therunning of the museum’s administrative business and, more generally, all the activities which are
not directly attached to the speciﬁc
ﬁelds of museum work (preservation,
research and communication). In thisregard, museum management essentially encompasses tasks relating toﬁnancial (accounting, management
control, ﬁnances) and legal responsibilities, to security and upkeep, tostaff management and to marketing
as well as to strategic procedures
and the general planning of museum
activities. The term management isof Anglo-Saxon origin (although
the Anglo-Saxon term comes fromthe French manège and ménage),
and is currently used in French withthe same meaning. The guidelinesor ‘style’ of management illustratea certain concept of museums – inparticular its relationship to public
service.
Traditionally the term administration (from the Latin administratio,

service, aid, handling) was used todeﬁne this type of museum activity,
but also, more generally, all the activities necessary to make a museum
function. The treatise of museology
by George Brown Goode, Museum
Administration (1896), examines the
aspects connected with the study ofthe display of collections and the daily
management, while also addressing
the overall vision of the museum andits integration into society. Rightfully
derived from the civil service rationale, the act of administering means,
whether referring to a public or a private service, ensuring that it operates
properly while taking responsibility
for initiating and running all its activities. The notion of (public) service,or even, with its religious undertones,
that of vocation, is closely related toadministration.
We are aware of the bureaucratic
connotation of the term ‘administration’ since it is used in connection with the (dys)function of publicauthorities. So it is not surprising thatthe general evolution of economic
theory in the last quarter of a century,
favouring the market economy, has
led to increasingly frequent recourse
to the concept of management,
which had been in use for a long45

time within proﬁt-making organisations. The concepts of market launch
and museum marketing, like thedevelopment of tools for museums
that have resulted from businesses(deﬁning strategies, focusing on the
public/visitor, resource management,
fundraising, etc.) has considerablychanged the museums themselves.
Thus some of the conﬂicts regarding
museum organisation and policies
have been directly conditioned by
the conﬂict, within the museum
itself, between a market rationale anda more traditional rationale of governance by public authorities. The
result has been the development of
new forms of ﬁnancing (expansion of
the ranges of museum shops, rentingof premises, reintroducing entrance
fees, developing popular temporary
exhibitions – blockbusters – or evenselling objects from the collection.
Increasingly these tasks which were
auxiliary when they ﬁrst began have
had a real impact on the conduct ofother museum tasks, to the pointthat they have sometimes been developed to the detriment of the otheroperations required for preservation,
research and even communication.
The speciﬁcity of museum management, which may be structured
around the sometimes contradictoryor hybrid logics of the market on the
one hand, and the public authorities
on the other hand, derives from thefact that it is structured around thelogic of giving (Mauss, 1923), throughdonations of objects and money or
the actions of volunteers and asso46

ciations of friends of the museum.
Although donations and volunteer
activities are properly and implicitly
taken into account, this aspect has
been less examined for its medium
and long-term impact on museum
management.
Z DERIVATIVES: MANAGER, COLLECTION
MANAGEMENTCORRELATED: ADMINISTRATION, BLOCKBUSTERS,)BOARD OF DIRECTORS, ENTRANCE FEES, FEASIBILITYSTUDY, FUNDRAISING, FRIENDS, HUMAN RESOURCES,MISSION STATEMENT, MUSEUM MARKETING, MUSEUM
TRUSTEES, NON-PROFIT ORGANISATIONS, PERFORMANCEMARKERS, PROJECTS, PLANNING, STRATEGY,VOLUNTEERS.

MEDIATION(INTERPRETATION)
n. (from 15 th century Vulgar Latin: mediatio,de mediare) – Equivalent in French: médiation;
Spanish: mediación; German: Vermittlung; Italian: mediazione; Portuguese: mediaçāo.

Mediation is the translation of theFrench médiation, which has thesame general museum meaning as‘interpretation’. Mediation is deﬁned
as an action aimed at reconciling parties or bringing them to agreement.
In the context of the museum, it is
the mediation between the museum
public and what the museum gives
its public to see; intercession, intermediate, mediator. Etymologically
we ﬁnd in mediation the root med,
meaning ‘middle’, a root which canbe found in many languages besides
English (Spanish medio, German
mitte) and which reminds us thatmediation is connected with the idea

of being in the median position, thatof a third element which places itself
between two distant poles and acts
as an intermediary. While this position characterises the legal aspects ofmediation, where someone negotiates
in order to reconcile adversaries andreach a modus vivendi, it also points
to the meaning that this concept
takes in the cultural and scientiﬁc ﬁe
ld of museology. Here too mediation
is an in-between, ﬁlling a space that it
will try to reduce, creating a connection or even acceptance.
1. The notion of mediation works
on several levels: on the philosophicallevel it served Hegel and his disciples
to describe the movement of history
itself. Dialectics, the driving forceof history, advances by successive
mediations: a ﬁrst situation (the thesis) must pass through the mediationof its opposite (antithesis) to progress
to a new condition (synthesis) which
retains something of each of the two
preceding moments.
The general concept of mediation also leads us to think about
the institution of culture itself as
the transmission of that common
heritage which unites the membersof a community and in which theyrecognise themselves. In this senseof the word mediation, it is throughthe mediation of its culture that individuals perceive and understand theworld and their own identity; several
writers speak of symbolic mediation.
Again in the cultural ﬁeld, mediationacts to analyse the ‘making public’ ofideas and cultural products – their

being taken care of by the media– and to describe their circulationin the whole social sphere. The
cultural sphere is seen as a dynamic,
nebulous area where products mix
together and take over from one another. Here the reciprocal mediationof cultural products leads to the ideaof intermediality, of the relationshipbetween medias and the way in which
one media – television or cinema forexample – translates forms of production made in another media (anovel adapted for the cinema). These
creations reach their targets by one
or other of the various technical aidsthat make up their mediatisation.
From this angle, analysis shows thatmany mediations are set in motion bycomplex chains of different agentsto guarantee content in the cultural
sphere and ensure that this content
reaches a broad public.
2. In museology the term mediation has been in frequent use in
France and in European Frenchspeaking zones for more than adecade, when speaking of ‘cultural
mediation’, or ‘scientiﬁc mediation’and ‘mediator’. Essentially it refers
to a whole range of actions carriedout in a museal context in order tobuild bridges between that whichis exhibited (seeing) and the meanings that these objects and sites may
carry (knowledge). Mediation sometimes seeks to favour the sharing ofexperiences and social interactions
between visitors, and the emergenceof common references. This is an
educational communication strategy,
47

which mobilises diverse technologies around the collections exhibitedto give visitors the means to better
understand certain aspects of theseand to share in their appropriation.
The term thus touches on the neighbouring museological concepts ofcommunication and museum public
relations, and especially interpretation, very much present in the AngloSaxon museum world and on North
American sites where it overlaps
to a great extent with the notion ofmediation. Interpretation, like mediation, assumes a divergence, a distancethat must be overcome between thatwhich is immediately perceived andthe underlying meanings of natural,cultural or historical phenomena.
Like means of mediation, interpretation materialises in interpersonal
human actions and in aids which
enhance the straightforward displayof exhibited objects to suggest their
meaning and importance. Born in thecontext of American natural parks,
the notion of interpretation has since
expanded to mean the hermeneutic
nature of the experience of visiting
museums and sites. Thus it can bedeﬁned as a revelation and unveilingwhich leads visitors to understand,and then to appreciate, and ﬁnally toprotect the heritage which it takes as
its object.
In the end, mediation comprises a central notion in a philosophy
which is hermeneutic and reﬂective(Paul Ricœur). It plays a fundamental role in each visitor’s quest for selfknowledge, a knowledge facilitated48

by the museum. When the viewer
stands face to face with works produced by other humans it is throughmediation that he or she can arrive ata special subjectivity which can inspire self-knowledge and understanding of one’s own human adventure.
This approach makes the museum,the custodian of the evidence andsigns of humanity, one of the bestplaces for this inescapable mediation which, in offering contact withthe world of cultural works, leads
each person on the path of a greater
understanding of self, and of reality
as a whole.
Z DERIVATIVES: MEDIATION, MEDIATOR, TO MEDIATE.
CORRELATED: ACTIVITIES, EDUCATION,
INTERCESSION, INTERPRETATION, POPULARISATION,
PUBLIC RELATIONS, VISITOR EXPERIENCE.

)MUSEALadj. – Equivalent in French: muséal; Spanish:museal; German: museal; Italian: museale;
Portuguese: museal.

The word has two meanings in
French (one when it is used as an
adjective to qualify ‘museum’ andanother when it is used as a noun),but only one in English, where it has
been rarely used until now, to qualify
a ﬁeld covering more than the classical notion of ‘museum’. The musealﬁeld covers not only the creation,
development and operation of themuseum institution but also reﬂections on its foundations and issues.
The museal ﬁeld of reference is characterised by a speciﬁc approach,which establishes a viewpoint on
reality with regard to the world of
heritage (to consider something fromthe museal angle, for example, means
to ask oneself whether it is possible
to preserve it for exhibition to the
public). Museology can thus be deﬁned as all the attempts to theorise
or think critically about the museal
ﬁeld, or as the ethics and philosophyof that which is museal.
1. Museal identiﬁes a “speciﬁc
relation to reality” (Stránský, 1987;
Gregorová, 1980). This places it
alongside politics and on the samelevel as social life, religion, demographics, economics and so on. Each
example is a sphere or an original
ﬁeld in which problems will be raised
which will be answered by concepts.
Thus the same phenomenon canbe found at the point where several
levels meet or, to speak in terms of
multidimensional statistical analysis, it will project itself onto several
heterogeneous levels. For example,
GMO (genetically modiﬁed organisms) can be simultaneously atechnical problem (biotechnology),a health problem (risks regarding
the biosphere), a political problem(ecological issues), and also a museal
problem: some social museums havedecided to stage exhibitions on therisks and the issues of GMO.
2. This position of museal as atheoretical ﬁeld of reference opens
considerable avenues to expanded
thinking, because the museum as
institution now appears to be just one
illustration or example of the entire

ﬁeld. This has two consequences:(1) It was not museums that gave rise
to museology, but rather museologythat founded museums (the Copernican revolution); (2) This allows us tounderstand that experiences which
are of a different nature to thoseusually identiﬁed with museums(collections, building, institution)
are part of the same problem, andto accept museums of substitutes,
museums without collections, extramural museums, towns as museums(Quatremère de Quincy, 1796),
and ecomuseums or even cybermuseums.
3. The speciﬁcity of the museal
ﬁeld, in other words, that whichmakes it unequivocal comparedto neighbouring ﬁelds, lies in two
aspects: (1) sensory display, which sets
the museal apart from the textual,
managed in a library, which offers
a documentation relayed throughthe medium of writing (mainly thatwhich is printed; books) and which
requires not only the knowledge ofa language but also the ability toread. This procures an experience
which is more abstract and moretheoretical at the same time. On theother hand, a museum does not need
any of these aptitudes, because thedocumentation it proposes is above
all sensory, perceivable by sight andsometimes by hearing, more rarely by
the three other senses of touch, taste
and smell. This means that an illiterate person or even a young childcan always gain something from a
museum visit, whereas they would49

be incapable of using the resourcesof a library. This also explains experiences of visits adapted for blind or
partially sighted people, where othersenses are called in to play (hearing
and especially touch) to discover
the sensory aspects of the exhibits.
A painting or a sculpture is made to
be seen ﬁrst of all, and reference toa text (or reading a placard if there
is one) only comes afterwards andis not absolutely essential. Thus we
can say when of the museum that it
fulﬁls a “sensory documentary function” (Deloche, 2007). (2) Marginalising reality, because the museum“speciﬁes itself while separating
itself” (Lebensztein, 1981). Unlike apolitical ﬁeld where it is possible totheorise about the management of
the concrete lives of people in society
through the mediation of institutions
such as the State, that which is museal
on the other hand serves to theorise
about the way in which an institution
creates, through separation and decontextualisation, in short throughthe putting into images, a space forsensory display “at the margin of all
reality” (Sartre). This is the essenceof a utopia, that is to say a completely imaginary space, certainly symbolic but not necessarily intangible.
This second point characterises what
one might call the utopian functionof museums, because in order tochange the world, one must be able
to imagine it otherwise, and thus todistance oneself from it, which is
why utopia as a ﬁction is not necessarily a lack or a deﬁciency, but rather
the imagining of a different world.
50

Z DERIVATIVES: MUSEAL FIELD, MUSEALIA,MUSEALITY, MUSEALISATION.
CORRELATED: MUSEOLOGY, MUSEUM,)
MUSEUMIFICATION (PEJORATIVE), REALITY, SENSORYDISPLAY, SENSORY EXPERIENCE, SPECIFIC RELATION.

MUSEALISATION
n. – Equivalent in French: muséalisation;
Spanish: musealisación; German: Musealisierung; Italian: musealizazione; Portuguese:musealisaçāo.

In the accepted understanding of
the term, musealisation means theplacing in the museum, or moregenerally, transforming a centre oflife, which may be a centre of humanactivity or a natural site, into a sortof museum. The expression ‘heritagisation’ is undoubtedly a better description of this principle, which rests
essentially on the idea of preservationof an object or a place, but does notcover the entire museal process. The
neologism ‘museumiﬁcation’ translates the pejorative idea of the ‘petriﬁcation’ (or mummiﬁcation) of a living
area, which may result from such a
process and which may be foundin numerous critical reviews aboutthe ‘musealisation of the world’.
From a strictly museological pointof view, musealisation is the operation of trying to extract, physicallyor conceptually, something from its
natural or cultural environment andgiving it a museal status, transforming it into a musealium or ‘museum
object’, that is to say, bringing it into
the museal ﬁeld.

The process of musealisation does
not consist of taking an object toplace it within the physical conﬁnesof the museum, as Zbyněk Stránský
explains. Through the change ofcontext and the process of selection
and display, the status of the objectchanges. Whether it is a religious
object, a useful object or one forenjoyment, animal or vegetable, evensomething that may not be clearly
conceived as an object, once inside
the museum it becomes the material and intangible evidence of man
and his environment and a source ofstudy and exhibition, thus acquiringa speciﬁc cultural reality.
The recognition of this change innature caused Stránský, in 1970, to
propose the term musealia to identify objects which had undergone theprocess of musealisation and could
thus claim the status of museum
objects. The term was translated into
French as muséalie (see Object).
Musealisation begins with a phaseof separation (Malraux, 1951) or ofsuspension (Déotte, 1986): objects
or things (real things) are separated
from their original context to be studied as documents representing thereality to which they formerly belonged. A museum object is no longer
an object to be used or exchanged,
but now delivers authentic evidenceof reality. This removal (Desvallées,1998) from reality is already an initial
form of substitution. An object separated from the context from where
it was taken is already no more thana substitute for the reality of which

it is supposed to be evidence. Thistransfer, by the separation that has
been made from the original environment, inevitably causes a loss of
information, which can be seen mostclearly from illegal archaeologicaldigs where the context of the objects
has been completely lost as they were
unearthed. It is for this reason thatmusealisation, as a scientiﬁc process, necessarily includes the essential museum activities: preservation(selection, acquisition, collection
management, conservation), research(including cataloguing) and communication (via exhibition, publications, etc.) or, from another pointof view, the activities around theselection, collection and display ofwhat has become musealia. At most,the work of musealisation gives animage which is only a substitute forthe reality from which these objects
were chosen. This complex substitute, or model of reality (built within
the museum) comprises museality,that is to say a speciﬁc value whichdocuments reality, but is in no way
reality itself.
Musealisation goes beyond thelogic of collections alone and is partof the tradition founded on rational
processes developed with the invention of modern sciences. The object
carrying the information or the
document-object, once musealised,
is incorporated into the core of themuseum’s scientiﬁc activity just as
this has developed since the Renaissance. The purpose of this activity is
to explore reality by means of sen51

sory perception, experiment, andstudy of its constituent parts. Thisscientiﬁc perspective conditions theobjective and repeated study of thething which has been conceptualized into an object, beyond the aura
which obscures its meaning. Not
contemplating, but seeing: the scientiﬁc museum not only displays beautiful objects, it invites the visitor tothink about their meaning. The actof musealisation leads the museum
away from being a temple to make itpart of a process which brings it closer to the laboratory.
CORRELATED: COLLECTING, COMMUNICATION,)DISPLAY, DOCUMENT-OBJECT, HOARDING, MUSEALIA,MUSEALITY, MUSEUM OBJECT, PRESERVATION, RESEARCH,RELIC, SELECTION, SEPARATION, SUSPENSION.

MUSEOGR APHY
(MUSEUM PR ACTICE)n. (derived from Latin museographia) – Frenchequivalent: muséographie, Spanish: museografía; German: Museographie; Italian: museografia; Portuguese: museografia.

The term museography ﬁrst appearedin the 18th century (Neikel, 1727) andis older than the word museology. It
has three speciﬁc meanings:
1. Currently museography isessentially deﬁned as the practicalor applied aspect of museology, thatis to say the techniques which havebeen developed to fulﬁl museal operations, in particular with regard
to the planning and ﬁtting out of
the museum premises, conservation, restoration, security and exhi52

bition. In contrast to museology,
the word museography has long
been used to identify the practicalactivities associated with museums.
The term is regularly used in the
French-speaking world, but rarely in
the English-speaking one, where
museum practice is preferred. Many
museologists from Central and Eastern Europe have used the term
applied museology, that is to say, thepractical application of techniques
resulting from the study of museology, a science undergoing development.
2. In French the use of the term
museography identiﬁes the art (orthe techniques) of exhibitions. For
some years the term expography(exhibit design) has been proposed
for the techniques involved in exhibitions, whether they be in a museum
or in a non-museal space. Generally
speaking, what we call the ‘museographical programme’ covers deﬁnition of the contents of the exhibition
and its requirements, as well as thefunctional links between the exhibition spaces and the other museum
areas. This deﬁnition does not meanthat museography (museum practice)
is deﬁned only by that part of themuseum which is seen by the visitor. Museographers (museum designers or exhibit designers), like othermuseum professionals, take into
account the scientiﬁc programmeand collection management, and aim
to display the objects selected by the
curator in a suitable manner. They
must know methods of conserva-

tion and how to inventorize museum
objects. They create the scenario forthe contents and propose a form of
language which includes additional
media to aid understanding. They
are concerned with the needs ofthe public and employ the communication methods most suitable forputting across the message of theexhibition. Their role, often as thehead of a project, is to coordinate
all the scientiﬁc and technical specialists working within a museum:organising them, sometimes clashingwith them and arbitrating. Other
speciﬁc posts have been created to
fulﬁl these tasks: the managementof the art works or objects is left tothe registrars, the head of security is
responsible for surveillance and thetasks carried out by this department,
the conservator is a specialist in preventive conservation and in remedialconservation measures, and evenrestoration. It is in this context, andin interrelation with the different
departments, that museographersconcern themselves with the exhibition tasks. Museography is distinct
from scenography (exhibition or
stage design), which is understood tomean all the techniques required for
installing and ﬁtting out display spaces, just as it is different from interior design. Certainly stage design
and museum interior design are apart of museography, which brings
museums closer to other methodsof visualisation, but other elements
must also be taken into account suchas the public, its understanding of

the message, and the preservationof heritage. These aspects makemuseographers (or exhibition specialists) the intermediary between
the collections curator, the architect
and the public. Their role varies,
however, depending whether or not
the museum or the exhibition site
has a curator to lead the project.
The further development of the roleof some specialists within museums(architects, artists, exhibition curators, etc.) has led to a constant ﬁ netuning of the museogapher’s role asintermediary.
3. Formerly and through its etymology, museography referred tothe description of the contents ofa museum. Just as a bibliography
is one of the fundamental stages ofscientiﬁc research, museography
was devised as a way to facilitate thesearch for documentary sources ofobjects in order to develop their systematic study. This meaning endured
throughout the 19th century and still
continues today in some languages,
in particular Russian.
Z DERIVATIVES: MUSEOGRAPHER, MUSEOGRAPHIC.
CORRELATED: EXHIBITION DESIGN, EXHIBITION)
PRACTICE, INTERIOR DESIGN, MUSEUM FUNCTIONS,MUSEUM OPERATIONS, MUSEUM PRACTICE.

MUSEOLOGY(MUSEUM STUDIES)n. – Equivalent in French: muséologie; Spanish: museología; German: Museologie,
Museumswissenschaft, Museumskunde; Italian: museologia; Portuguese: museologia.

53

Etymologically speaking museology is the ‘study of the museum’ (ormuseum studies), and not its practice,which is museography. But the term
museology and its derivative museological, accepted in its wider sense in
the 1950s, now has ﬁve clearly distinct meanings.
1. The ﬁrst and most commonly
accepted meaning applies the term
museology to anything relating tomuseums and generally listed, in
this dictionary, under the heading
museal. Thus one might speak of
the museological departments of alibrary (the reserved section or thenumismatic cabinet), museologicalquestions (relating to museums) andso on. This is often the meaning usedin Anglo-Saxon countries, which haseven spread from North America
to Latin-American countries. Thus,
where there is no speciﬁc recognised
profession, such as in France where
the general term curator (conservateur) would be used, the term museologist applies to the entire museum
profession (for example in Québec),
in particular to consultants given thetask of drawing up a museum projector creating and staging an exhibition.
This use is not favoured here.
2. The second meaning of theterm is generally accepted in many
western university networks and isclose to the etymological sense of
the word: museum studies. The mostcommonly used deﬁnition is that
proposed by Georges Henri Rivière:“Museology: an applied science, thescience of the museum. Museology
54

studies its history, its role in society,the speciﬁc forms of research andphysical conservation, activities
and dissemination, organisationand functioning, new or musealisedarchitecture, sites that have been
received or chosen, its typology
and its deontology” (Rivière, 1981).
In some ways museology contrasts
with museography, which refers to
the practices attached to museology. Anglo-Americans are generally
reluctant to accept the invention of
new ‘sciences’ and have favoured
the expression museum studies, particularly in Great Britain where theterm museology is still rarely used
to date. Although the term has been
increasingly frequently applied internationally since the 1950s, along with
the increased interest in museums, it
is still rarely used by people who livewith museums on a daily basis, andthe use of the term remains limited
to people who observe the museumfrom the outside. This use of museology, widely accepted by professionals, has gradually established itself
in Romance countries from the 1960s,
replacing the term museography.
3. From the 1960s in Central andEastern Europe, museology gradually came to be considered as a
genuine ﬁeld of scientiﬁc research(albeit a developing science) and an
independent discipline examining
reality. This view, which greatly
inﬂuenced ICOFOM in the years
1980-1990, presents museology as
the study of a speciﬁc relationshipbetween man and reality, a study inwhich museums, a phenomenon set
in a speciﬁc time, are only one of thepossible manifestations. “Museology
is a self-differentiating, independentscientiﬁc discipline the subject ofwhich is a speciﬁc attitude of man
to reality expressed objectively invarious museum forms throughout
history, an expression of and a
proportionate part of memory systems. Museology, by nature a social
science, pertains to the sphere of
mnemonic and documentary scientiﬁc disciplines, and contributes tothe understanding of Man withinsociety” (Stránský, 1980). This particular approach, freely criticised (thedetermination to impose museology
as a science and to cover the wholeﬁeld of heritage seemed pretentious
to more than one), but it is nonetheless fertile with regard to its implications. Thus the object of museology
is not the museum, since this is acreation that is relatively recent interms of the history of humanity.
Taking this statement as a starting
point, the concept of a “speciﬁc relation of man to reality”, sometimes
referred to as museality (Waidacher,1996), was gradually deﬁned. Thus
following in the wake of the Brno
school which prevailed at the time
one could deﬁne museology as “Ascience studying the speciﬁc relationof Man to reality, consisting of the
purposeful and systematic collecting
and conservation of selected inanimate, material, mobile, and mainly
three-dimensional objects documenting the development of nature andsociety” (Gregorová, 1980). However, the likening of museology to ascience – even under development– has slowly been abandoned in so
far as neither its object of study, nor
its methods, truly correspond to theepistemological criteria of a speciﬁcscientiﬁc approach.
4. The new museology (la nouvellemuséologie in French, where theconcept originated) widely inﬂuenced museology in the 1980s, ﬁrst
gathering some French theoreticians
and then spreading internationallyfrom 1984. Referring to a few pioneers who had published innovative texts since 1970, this current ofthought emphasised the social roleof museums and its interdisciplinary
character, along with its new styles of
expression and communication. New
museology was particularly interested in new types of museums, conceived in contrast to the classical modelin which collections are the centre ofinterest. These new museums are ecomuseums, social museums, scientiﬁc
and cultural centres, and generally
speaking, most of the new proposals aimed at using the local heritage
to promote local development. In
English museum literature the term
New Museology appeared at the endof the 1980s (Virgo, 1989) and is a
critical discourse on the social andpolitical role of museums – lendinga certain confusion to the spread of
the French term, which is less known
to the English-speaking public.
5. According to a ﬁfth meaningof the term, which we favour here55

because it includes all the others,museology covers a much wider ﬁeld
comprising all the efforts at theorisation and critical thinking about
the museal ﬁeld. In other words,
the common denominator of thisﬁeld could be deﬁned as a speciﬁc
relation between man and reality,
which is expressed by documentingthat which is real and can be grasped
through direct sensory contact. Thisdeﬁnition does not reject a priori any
form of museum, including the oldest(Quiccheberg) and the most recent(cyber museums), because it tends toconcern itself with a domain whichis freely open to all experiments inthe museal ﬁeld. Nor is it limited topeople who call themselves museologists. We should note that if someprotagonists have made museology
their ﬁeld of choice, to the point ofpresenting themselves as museologists, others tied to their professional branch who only approach themuseal sphere on occasion prefer tokeep a certain distance from “museologists”, even though they have, or
have had, a fundamental inﬂuencein the development of this ﬁeld ofstudy (Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Dagognet, Debray, Foucault, Haskell,
McLuhan, Nora or Pomian). The
guidelines in a map of the musealﬁeld can be traced in two different
directions: either with reference tothe main functions inherent to theﬁeld (documentation, collecting,display and safeguarding, research,communication), or by considering
the different branches of knowledge
56

which examine museology from time
to time.
With this last view in mind, Bernard Deloche proposed deﬁning
museology as museal philosophy.
“Museology is the philosophy of themuseal ﬁeld which has two tasks:(1) it serves as metatheory for thescience of intuitive concrete documentation, (2) it provides regulating
ethics for all institutions responsible
for managing the intuitive concrete
documentary function” (Deloche,2001).
Z DERIVATIVES: MUSEOLOGICAL, MUSEOLOGIST.
CORRELATED: MUSEAL, MUSEALIA MUSEALITY,MUSEALISATION, MUSEALIZE, MUSEOGRAPHY,MUSEUM, MUSEUM OBJECT, NEW MUSEOLOGY,REALITY.

)

MUSEUMn. (from the Greek mouseion, temple of themuses). – Equivalent in French: musée; Spanish: museo; German: Museum; Italian: museo;
Portuguese: museu.

The term ‘museum’ may mean either
the institution or the establishment
or the place generally designed to
select, study and display the material
and intangible evidence of man andhis environment. The form and thefunctions of museums have varied
considerably over the centuries.
Their contents have diversiﬁed, as
have their mission, their way of operating and their management.
1. Most countries have establisheddeﬁnitions of museum throughlegislative texts or national organi-sations. The professional deﬁ nitionof museum most widely recognized
today is still that given in 2007 in the
Statutes of the International Councilof Museums (ICOM): “A museum
is a non-proﬁt, permanent institution in the service of society and its
development, open to the public,
which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits
the tangible and intangible heritageof humanity and its environment forthe purposes of education, study andenjoyment.” This deﬁnition replaces
that used as the term of reference
for over 30 years: “A museum is a
non-proﬁt making, permanent institution in the service of the society
and its development, and open to the
public, which acquires, conserves,
researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, educationand enjoyment, material evidence ofman and his environment” (ICOM
Statutes, 1974).
The difference between these two
deﬁnitions, which is at ﬁrst sightbarely signiﬁcant – a reference tothe intangible heritage added anda few changes in structure – nevertheless attests on the one hand to the
preponderance of Anglo-American
logic within ICOM, and on the otherto a diminution of the role given to
research within the institution. Initially the 1974 deﬁnition, written in
French as the lead language, was afairly free translation into English tobetter reﬂect the Anglo-American
logic about museum functions – oneof which is the transmission of heri-

tage. English has become the working language most widely used incouncil meetings, and ICOM, likemost international organisations,now operates in English too; it seems
that the work to draft a new deﬁnition was based on this English translation. The structure of the Frenchdeﬁnition of 1974 emphasised
research, introduced as the driving
force of the institution: “Le musée est
une institution permanente, sans but
lucratif, au service de la société et deson développement, ouverte au public
et qui fait des recherches concernant
les témoins matériels de l’homme
et de son environnement, acquiert
ceux-là, les conserve, les communique
et notamment les expose à des ﬁnsd’études, d’éducation et de délectation.” (ICOM Statutes, 1974). The
literal translation, but not the ofﬁcial
one, reads: “A museum is a permanent, non-proﬁt institution, in theservice of the society and its development, open to the public, which
does research regarding the material
evidence of man and his environment…”, In 2007 the principle ofresearch (modiﬁed in French by theword étudier - to study) was relegated to a list of the general functionsof museums, as in the 1974 English
version.
2. For many museologists, and inparticular those who claim to adhere
to the concept of museology taught
in the years 1960-1990 by the Czech
school (Brno and the International
Summer School of Museology), themuseum is only one means among57

many that attest to a “speciﬁc relationship between Man and reality”,
a relationship which is deﬁned by“purposeful and systematic collecting and conservation of selected inanimate, material, mobile, and mainly
three-dimensional objects documenting the development of natureand society” (Gregorová, 1980).
Before the museum was deﬁ ned assuch in the 18th century, according
to a concept borrowed from Greek
antiquity and its revival during thewestern Renaissance, every civilisation had a number of places, institutions and establishments that weremore or less similar to those that wegroup under the same word today.
In this regard the ICOM deﬁ nition
is considered to be clearly marked
by its time and its western context,
but also too prescriptive, since its
purpose is essentially corporatist.
A ‘scientiﬁc’ deﬁnition of museum
should, in this sense, free itself
from certain elements contributed
by ICOM, such as the not-for-proﬁt
aspect of a museum: a proﬁt-making
museum (such as the Musée Grévin
in Paris) is still a museum, even if it
is not recognised by ICOM. We canthus more broadly and more objectively deﬁ ne museum as “a permanent
museological institution, which preserves collections of ‘physical documents’ and generates knowledge
about them” (Van Mensch, 1992).
For his part Schärer deﬁnes museum
as “a place where things and related
values are preserved studied andcommunicated, as signs that inter58

pret absent facts” (Schärer, 2007) or,in a way that seems tautological atﬁrst, as the place where the musealisation takes place. In an even wider
sense, the museum can be understood as a “place of memory” (Nora,
1984; Pinna, 2003), a ‘phenomenon’(Scheiner, 2007), covering institutions, different places or territories,
experiences, and even intangible
spaces.
3. From this perspective whichgoes beyond the limited nature of
the traditional museum, it is deﬁ ned
as a tool devised by man with the
purpose of archiving, understanding, and transmitting. One could,
like Judith Spielbauer (1987), saythat museums are an instrument
to foster “an individual’s perception of the interdependence of thesocial, aesthetic and natural worlds
in which he lives by providing information and experience and fostering
self-knowledge within this wider
context.” Museums can also be “aspeciﬁc function which may or may
not take on the features of an institution, the objective of which is
to ensure, through a sensory experience, the storage and transmissionof culture understood as the entire
body of acquisitions that make aman out of a being who is genetically human” (Deloche, 2007).
These deﬁnitions cover museums
which are incorrectly referred to as
virtual museums (in particular thosethat are on paper, on CD-ROM oron the Web) as well as more traditional institutional museums, inclu-

ding even the museums of antiquity,which were more schools of philosophy than collections in the accepted
sense of the term.
4. This last use of the term
museum brings us to the principlesof the ecomuseum in its original
conception, that is to say a museal
institution which, for the development of a community, combinesconservation, display and explanation of the cultural and natural heritage held by this same community;
the ecomuseum represents a living
and working environment on a given
territory, and the research associatedwith it. “The ecomuseum […] on agiven territory, expresses the relationship between man and nature
through time and space on this territory. It is composed of property ofrecognised scientiﬁc and culturalinterest which is representative of
the community it serves: non-built
immovable property, natural wild
spaces, natural spaces occupied byman; built immovable property;
movable property; fungible goods.
It includes an administrative centre,
headquarters of the major structures:
reception, research, conservation,
display, cultural action, administration, in particular one or more ﬁeld
laboratories, conservation bodies,meeting halls, socio-cultural workshops, accommodation etc.; trails andobservation points for exploring theterritory; different architectural,archaeological and geological elements…duly indicated and explained” (Rivière, 1978).
5. With the development of com-puters and the digital world theconcept of cyber museum, often
incorrectly called ‘virtual’, graduallybecame accepted; a notion generally
deﬁned as “a logically related collection of digital objects composed in avariety of media which, through its
connectivity and its multi-accessible
nature, lends itself to transcending
traditional methods of communicating and interacting with visitors..;
it has no real place or space; its
objects and the related information
can be disseminated all over theworld” (Schweibenz, 1998). Thisdeﬁnition, probably derived fromthe relatively recent notion of virtual computer memory, appears tobe something of a misinterpretation.
We must remember that ‘virtual’ is
not the opposite of ‘real’, as we tend
to believe too readily, but rather the
opposite of ‘actual’ in its original
sense of ‘now existing’. An egg is avirtual chicken; it is programmed
to become a chicken and should
become one if nothing gets in theway of its development. In this sense
the virtual museum can be seen as all
the museums conceivable, or all theconceivable solutions applied to the
problems answered by traditional
museums. Thus the virtual museum
can be deﬁned as a “concept which
globally identiﬁes the problem areasof the museal ﬁeld, that is to say theeffects of the process of decontextualisation/recontextualisation; acollection of substitutes can be a
virtual museum just as much as acomputerised data base; it is the59museum in its exterior theatre of operations” (Deloche, 2001). The virtual
museum is the package of solutions
that may be applied to museum problems, and naturally includes thecyber museum, but is not limited
to it.

60

Z DERIVATIVES: VIRTUAL MUSEUM.
CORRELATED: CYBER MUSEUM, MUSEAL,)MUSEALIA, MUSEALISATION, MUSEALISE, MUSEOGRAPHER,
MUSEOGRAPHY, MUSEOLOGICAL, MUSEOLOGIST,
MUSEOLOGY, MUSEUMIFICATION (PEJORATIVE), MUSEUMSTUDIES, NEW MUSEOLOGY, EXHIBITION, INSTITUTION,PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, REALITY.

O
OBJECT [MUSEUMOBJECT] OR MUSEALIA
n. – (from the Latin objectum, past participle objectare, to throw against) – Equivalent
in French: objet; Spanish: objeto; German:
Objekt, Gegenstand; Italian: oggetto; Portuguese: objecto, (Brazilian: objeto)

The term museum object is sometimes replaced by the neologism
musealia, modelled on the Latin neuter noun musealium with musealia in
the plural. The equivalent in French:
muséalie (rarely used), musealia; Spanish: musealia; German: Musealie,Museumsobjekt; Italian: musealia;
Portuguese: musealia.
In the simplest philosophicalsense of the word an object is not in
itself a form of reality, but a product,a result, or an equivalence. In otherwords it means that which is placed, or thrown forward (ob-jectum,
Gegen-stand) by a subject, who treats
it as different from himself, even if heconsiders himself as an object. Thisdistinction between the subject andthe object developed relatively lateand is a feature of Western culture.
In this way the object is different
from the thing, which is related tothe subject as a continuation or an
implement (for example, a tool as acontinuation of the hand is a thing
and not an object).

A museum object is somethingwhich is musealised; a thing can bedeﬁned as any kind of reality in general. The expression ‘museum object’
could almost be a pleonasm in so far
as the museum is not only the place
which shelters objects, but also aplace with the principal mission oftransforming things into objects.
1. The object is not in any caseraw, reality or simply a given item
which it would be sufﬁcient to collect, for example, to be part of amuseum’s collection, as one would
collect seashells on the shore. It is an
ontological status which, in given circumstances, a particular thing willassume, on the understanding thatthe thing would not be considered
an object in other circumstances.
The difference between the thing
and the object lies in the fact that thething has become a concrete part oflife and that the relationship we havewith it is a relationship of affection
or symbiosis. This is revealed by theanimism of societies often reputed
to be ‘primitive’: it is a relationshipof usability, as is the case of the tool
adapted to the shape of the hand.
By contrast, an object is always thatwhich the subject sets down in frontof himself, and separate from him; itis thus what is ‘facing’ and different.
61

In this sense the object is abstractand dead, closed on itself, as evidenced by that series of objects which
is a collection (Baudrillard, 1968).
This status of the object is considered today to be a purely western product (Choay, 1968; Van Lier, 1969;
Adotevi, 1971), in so far as it was theWest which broke with the tribal
way of life and thought about the gap
between subjects and objects for theﬁrst time (Descartes, Kant, and later
McLuhan, 1969).
2. Through their work of acquisition, research, preservation andcommunication, museums can bepresented as one of the major authorities in the ‘production’ of objects.
In this case, the museum object –musealium or musealia – does nothave any intrinsic reality, even if themuseum is not the only instrument
to ‘produce’ objects. In fact otherapproaches are ‘objectivising’ as is
the case in particular for scientiﬁc processes to establish reference
standards (c.f., measurement scales)
which are completely independent of
the subject and which consequently
ﬁnd it difﬁcult to treat that which isliving as such (Bergson) because it
tends to turn it into an object, wherein lies the difﬁculty of physiology
compared to anatomy. The museal
object is made to be seen, with its
whole mass of implicit connotations,because we can display it in orderto stir emotions, to entertain, or toteach. This action of displaying is soessential that it is what turns a thing
into an object by creating this dis62

tance, whereas the priority in scientiﬁc operations is the requirement
to account for things in a universallyintelligible context.
3. Naturalists and ethnologists,
as well as museologists, generally
select things which they already callobjects, according to their potential as evidence, that is the qualityof information (markers) that they
can provide to reﬂect the ecosystems or cultures the traces of which
they wish to preserve. “Musealia(museum objects) are authentic
movable objects which, as irrefutableevidence, show the development of
nature and society” (Schreiner 1985).
The wealth of information they
provide has led ethnologists such
as Jean Gabus (1965) or Georges
Henri Rivière (1989) to attribute tothem the name witness-object, which
they retain when they are displayed.
Georges Henri Rivière even used theexpression symbol-object to describe
certain witness objects heavy with
content which might claim to summarise a whole culture or period.
The result of systematically making
things into objects is that they canbe studied much better than if they
were still in their original context(ethnographic ﬁeld, private collection
or gallery), but it can also become
fetishist: a ritual mask, a ceremonial
costume, a prayer tool etc. quickly
change their status when they enter
the museum. We are no longer inthe real world, but in the imaginary
world of the museum. For example,
the visitor is not allowed to sit on

a chair in a museum of decorative
arts, which supposes an establisheddistinction between the functional
chair and the chair-object. Theirfunction has been removed and they
have been ‘decontextualised’, whichmeans that from now on they will nolonger serve their original purpose
but have entered a symbolic orderwhich gives them new meaning, leading Krzysztof Pomian to call suchobjects semiophores (“carriers ofsigniﬁcance”) and to attribute a newvalue to them – which is ﬁrst of all
purely a museal value but which canbecome an economic value. They
thus become sacred (consecrated)
evidence of culture.
4. Exhibitions reﬂect these choices. For semiologists like Jean Davallon “Musealia can be considered lessas things (from the point of view of
their physical reality) than as language
beings (they are deﬁned, recognized
as worthy of being safeguarded anddisplayed) and as supports of social
practices (they are collected, catalogued, displayed etc.)” (Davallon,
1992). Objects can thus be usedas signs, just like words in speech,
when they are used in an exhibition.
But objects are not just signs, sinceby their presence alone they can bedirectly perceived by our senses.
For this reason the term real thingis often used to indicate a museum
object exhibited because of its powerof “authentic presence”, that is “Thereal things of the museum language
are those things which we present as
what they are, not as models or ima-

ges or representations of somethingelse.” (Cameron, 1968). For various
reasons (sentimental, aesthetic, etc.)
we have an intuitive relationship withthat which is displayed. The noun
exhibit refers to a real thing which isdisplayed, but also to anything displayable (a sound, photographic or
ﬁlm document, a hologram, a reproduction, a model, an installation ora conceptual model) (see Exhibition).
5. A certain tension exists between
the real thing and its substitute.
Regarding this we must note that forsome people the semiophore object
is only a carrier of meaning when
it is presented for itself, and not
through a substitute. Wide as it may
seem, this purely reist concept does
not take account of either the origins of museums in the Renaissance(see Museum) or the development
and diversity reached by museology
during the 19th century. Nor doesit allow us to take into account thework of a number of museums whose
activities are essentially on othersupport systems such as the internet or duplicated media, or moregenerally all the museums madeof substitutes such as museums ofcasts (gypsotheques), collections ofmodels, collections of wax reproductions (ceratheques), or sciencecentres which display mostly models.
Since these objects were considered
as elements of a language, they canbe used to create lecture exhibitions,but they are not always adequate tosustain the entire lecture. We must
therefore envisage other elements
63

of a language of substitution. Whenthe exhibit replaces a real thing or
authentic object, through its function or nature, the replacement iscalled a substitute. It may be a photograph, a drawing or a model ofthe real thing. The substitute would
thus be said to be in conﬂict with the‘authentic’ object, even though it is
not exactly the same as a copy of theoriginal (such as the casts of a sculpture or copy of a painting), in so far
as substitutes can be created directlyfrom an idea or a process and not justby producing a perfect copy. According to the form of the original andthe use that should be made of it,
the substitute can be two or threedimensional. The idea of authenticity, particularly important in ﬁnearts museums (masterpieces, copies
and fakes), inﬂuences the majorityof the questions attached to the status and value of museum objects.
We must nonetheless note that there
are museums which have collections
made solely of substitutes, and that,generally speaking, the policy of
substitutes (copies, plaster casts orwax, models or digital images) opens
the ﬁeld of museum operations very
wide and leads us to question all thepresent values of the museum from64

the point of view of museal ethics.
Moreover, from the wider perspective mentioned above, any object displayed in a museum context must be
considered as a substitute for the reality it represents because as a musealised thing, the museum object is a
substitute for this thing (Deloche,2001).
6. In the museological context,
especially in the ﬁelds of archaeology
and ethnology, specialists are accustomed to invest the object with themeaning they have developed fromtheir own research. But this raises
several problems. First of all, theobjects change their meaning in their
original environment at the whim ofeach generation. Next, each visitor isfree to interpret them according tohis or her own culture. The result isthe relativism summarised by Jacques
Hainard in 1984 in a sentence which
has become famous: “The object
is not the truth of anything. Firstly
polyfunctional, then polysemic, ittakes on meaning only when placedin context.” (Hainard, 1984)
CORRELATED: ARTEFACT, AUTHENTICITY,)
COLLECTION, COPY, EXHIBIT, FETISH-OBJECT, REAL THING,REPLICA, REPRODUCTION, SPECIMEN, SUBSTITUTE, THING,
TRANSITORY OBJECT, WITNESS-OBJECT, WORK OF ART.

P
PRESERVATIONn – Equivalent French: préservation; Spanish:preservación; German: Bewahrung, Erhaltung; Italian: preservazione; Portuguese:preservaçāo.

To preserve means to protect a thing
or a group of things from different
hazards such as destruction, deterioration, separation or even theft; thisprotection is ensured by gathering
the collection in one place, inventorising it, sheltering it, making it secureand repairing it.
In museology, preservation covers
all the operations involved when an
object enters a museum, that is tosay all the operations of acquisition,entering in the inventory, recording
in the catalogue, placing in storage,
conservation, and if necessary restoration. The preservation of heritage
generally leads to a policy whichstarts with the establishment of a procedure and criteria for acquisition of
the material and intangible heritageof humanity and its environment,
and continues with the managementof those things which have becomemuseum objects, and ﬁnally with
their conservation. In this sense theconcept of preservation represents
that which is fundamentally at stakein museums, because the building up

of collections structures the missionof museums and their development.
Preservation is one axis of museal
action, the other being transmission
to the public.
1. The acquisition policy is, in mostcases, a fundamental part of the way
any museum operates. Acquisition,
within the museum, brings together
all the means by which a museum
takes possession of the material andintangible heritage of humanity:
collecting, archaeological digs, gifts
and legacy, exchange, purchase, andsometimes methods reminiscent ofpillage and abduction (combated by
ICOM and UNESCO – Recommendation of 1956 and Convention of1970). The management of collections
and the overseeing of collections comprise all the operations connectedwith the administrative handling ofmuseum objects, that is to say theirrecording in the museum catalogue orregistration in the museum inventory
in order to certify their museal status – which, in some countries, gives
them a speciﬁc legal status, since theitems entered in the inventory, especially in publicly owned museums,
are inalienable and imprescriptible.
In some countries such as the UnitedStates, museums may exceptionallydeaccession objects by transfer to65another museal institution, destruction or sale. Storage and classiﬁcation
are also part of collection management, along with the supervision of
all movements of objects within andoutside the museum. Finally, theobjective of conservation is to use all
the means necessary to guarantee
the condition of an object against
any kind of alteration in order tobequeath it to future generations.
In the broadest sense these actions
include overall security (protection
against theft and vandalism, ﬁre andﬂoods, earthquakes or riots), generalmeasures known as preventive conservation, or “all measures and actions
aimed at avoiding and minimizing
future deterioration or loss. They arecarried out within the context or on
the surroundings of an item, but more
often a group of items, whatever theirage and condition. These measuresand actions are indirect – they do
not interfere with the materials andstructures of the items. They do not
modify their appearance” (ICOMCC, 2008). Additionally, remedialconservation is “all actions directly
applied to an item or a group of items
aimed at arresting current damaging
processes or reinforcing their structure. These actions are only carriedout when the items are in such afragile condition or deteriorating at
such a rate that they could be lost ina relatively short time. These actions
sometimes modify the appearance of
the items” (ICOM-CC, 2008). Restoration covers “all actions directly
applied to a single and stable item
66

aimed at facilitating its appreciation, understanding and use. These
actions are only carried out when theitem has lost part of its signiﬁcanceor function through past alteration
or deterioration. They are based on
respect for the original material.
Most often such actions modify theappearance of the item” (ICOM-CC,
2008). To preserve the integrity of
the items as far as possible, restorers
choose interventions which are reversible and can be easily identiﬁed.
2. In practice, the concept ofconservation is often preferred tothat of preservation. For manymuseum professionals, conservation,
which addresses both the action
and the intention to protect cultural property, whether material orintangible, constitutes a museum’s
core mission. This explains the use
in French of the word conservateurs(in English curators, in the UK keepers) which appeared at the time of
the French Revolution. For a longtime (throughout the 19th century atleast) this word seems to have best
described the function of a museum.
Moreover the current deﬁnition of
museum by ICOM (2007) does not
use the term preservation to cover
the concepts of acquisition andconservation. From this perspective,
the notion of conservation should
probably be envisaged in a muchwider sense, to include questions ofinventories and storage. Nonetheless,this concept collides with a different
reality, which is that conservation(for example, in the ICOM Conser-

vation Committee) is much moreclearly connected with the work ofconservation and restoration, as described above, than with the work ofmanagement or overseeing of thecollections. New professional ﬁelds
have evolved, in particular collection
archivists and registrars. The notionof preservation takes account of allthese activities.
3. The concept of preservation,in addition, tends to objectivise
the inevitable tensions which exist
between each of these functions (notto mention the tensions between
preservation and communication or
research), which have often been thetarget of much criticism: “The ideaof conservation of the heritage takes
us back to the anal drives of all capitalist societies” (Baudrillard, 1968;
Deloche, 1985, 1989). A number ofacquisition policies, for example,
include deaccession policies at thesame time (Neves, 2005). The question of the restorer’s choices and,generally speaking, the choices tobe made with regard to conservation
operations (what to keep and what todiscard?) are, along with deaccession,some of the most controversial issues
in museum management. Finally,
museums are increasingly acquiringand preserving intangible heritage,
which presents new problems andforces them to ﬁnd conservation
techniques which can be adapted forthese new types of heritage.
CORRELATED: ACQUISITION, DOCUMENT, ITEMS,)MONUMENT, GOODS, PROPERTY, SEMIOPHORE, THINGS,RELIC (HOLY), WORK; HERITAGE, INTANGIBLE, MATERIAL;REALITY; COMMUNITY; PREVENTIVE CONSERVATION,REMEDIAL CONSERVATION, SAFEGUARD; COLLECTION
MANAGEMENT, COLLECTION OVERSIGHT, COLLECTION
MANAGER, CURATOR, CONSERVATOR, INVENTORY,RESTORER; DEACCESSION, RESTITUTION.

PROFESSION
n. – Equivalent in French: profession; Spanish:
profesión; German: Beruf; Italian: professione; Portuguese: profissāo.

Profession is deﬁned ﬁrst of all in asocially deﬁned setting, and not by
default. Profession does not constitute a theoretical ﬁeld: a museologist
can call himself an art historian or abiologist by profession, but he canalso be considered – and sociallyaccepted – as a professional museologist. For a profession to exist, moreover, it must deﬁne itself as such, andalso be recognised as such by others,
which is not always the case in themuseum world. There is not one
profession, but several museal professions (Dubé, 1994), that is to saya range of activities attached to themuseum, paid or unpaid, by which
one can identify a person (in particular for his civil status) and place him
in a social category.
If we refer to the concept of museology as presented here, most museum
employees are far from having received the professional training that
their title would imply, and very few
can claim to be museologists simply
because they work in a museum.
There are, however, many positions
which require a speciﬁc background.
ICTOP (The ICOM International
67

Committee for the Training of Personnel) has listed twenty of them(Ruge, 2008).
1. Many employees, often the
majority of people working in theinstitution, follow a career path
which has only a relatively superﬁcial relationship with the very
principle of the museum – whereas
to the wider public, they personify
museums. This is the case withsecurity ofﬁcers or guards, the staff
responsible for the surveillance of
exhibition areas in the museum,
who are the main contacts with the
public, like the receptionists. The
speciﬁcity of museum surveillance(precise measures for security and forevacuating the public and the collections etc.) has gradually throughout
the 19th century imposed speciﬁc
recruitment categories, in particularthat of a body which is separate fromthe rest of the administrative staff.
At the same time it was the ﬁgure of
the curator who appeared as the ﬁrst
speciﬁcally museal profession. For along time the curator was in chargeof all tasks directly relating to theobjects in the collection, that is theirpreservation, research and communication (PRC model, Reinwardt
Academie). The curator’s training isﬁrstly associated with the study ofthe collections (art history, naturalsciences, ethnology etc.) even if, forseveral years now, it has been backed
up by a more museological training
such as that given by a number ofuniversities. Many curators who havespecialised in the study of the collections – which remains uncontested as
68

their main ﬁeld of activity - cannot
call themselves either museologists,or museographers (museum practitioners), even if in practice some ofthem easily combine these different
aspects of museal work. In France,
unlike other European countries, thebody of curators is generally recruited by competition and beneﬁts froma speciﬁc training school (Institut
national du Patrimoine/the National
Heritage Institute).
2. The term museologist can beapplied to researchers studying thespeciﬁc relationship between man
and reality, characterised as the
documentation of the real by direct
sensory perception. Their ﬁeld ofactivity essentially concerns theory
and critical thinking in the museal
ﬁeld, so they may work elsewhere
than in a museum, for example ina university or in other research
centres. The term is also applied byextension to any person working fora museum and holding the functionof project leader or exhibition programmer. So museologists differ
from curators, and also from museographers, who are responsible for thedesign and general organisation of
the museum and its security, conservation and restoration facilities alongwith the exhibition galleries, whether
permanent or temporary. Museographers, with their speciﬁc technicalskills, have an expert vision of all theways in which a museum operates –preservation, research and communication – and by drawing up theappropriate speciﬁcations they canmanage the information connectedwith the overall work of the museum,from preventive conservation to theinformation disseminated to different publics. The museographer differs from the exhibit designer; a term
proposed to indicate the person withall the skills required to create exhibitions, whether these are situated ina museum or in a non-museal setting,and from the exhibition designer inthat the latter, who uses techniques to
set the scene for the exhibition, mayalso ﬁnd himself skilled at setting up
an exhibition (see Museography). The
professions of exhibit designer andexhibition designer have long been
related to that of decorator, whichrefers to decoration of the spaces.
But the work of interior decorationin functional areas pertaining to thenormal activities of interior decoration differs from the tasks that are
required for exhibitions, which are in
the ﬁeld of exhibit design. In exhibitions, their work tends more towards
ﬁtting out the space using exhibits aselements of decoration, rather thanstarting from the exhibits to be displayed and given meaning within
the space. Many exhibit designers
or exhibition designers call themselves ﬁrst of all architects of interior
design, which does not mean that any
architect of interior design can claim
the status of exhibit designer or exhibition designer, or of museographer.
In this context the exhibition anddisplay curator (a role often played by
the curator, but sometimes by a person from outside the museum) takes
on its full meaning, since he or she

produces the scientiﬁc project for theexhibition and coordinates the entire
project.
3. Assisted by the development of
the museal ﬁeld, a number of professions have gradually emerged andto become independent, and also to
conﬁrm their importance and theirwill to be a part of the museum’s
destinies. This phenomenon canessentially be observed in the ﬁelds
of preservation and communication.
In preservation, it was ﬁrst of all theconservator, as a professional with
scientiﬁc competences and above
all the techniques required for thephysical treatment of the collection
objects (restoration, preventive andremedial conservation), who required highly specialised training (bytypes of material and techniques),
competences which the curator does
not have. Similarly the tasks imposedby the inventory, relating to management of the reserves, and also to themoving of items, favoured the relatively recent creation of the post ofregistrar, who is responsible for the
movement of objects, insurance matters, management of the reserves andsometimes also the preparation andmounting of an exhibition (at which
point the registrar becomes the exhibition curator).
4. Regarding communication, thestaff attached to the educational
department, along with all the staff
who work in public relations, havebeneﬁted from the emergence ofa number of speciﬁc professions.
Undoubtedly one of the oldest ofthese is that of guide-interpreter,
69

guide-lecturer or lecturer, who
accompanies visitors (most often ingroups) through the exhibition galleries, giving them information about
the exhibition and the objects on display, essentially following the principle of guided visits. This ﬁrst type ofaccompaniment has been joined by
the function of animator, the person
in charge of workshops or other experiences coming under the museum’s
communication methods, and thenthat of cultural projects coordinator
who is the intermediary between thecollections and the public and whose
aim is more to interpret the collections and to encourage the public totake interest in them than to systematically teach the public according to apre-established content. Increasingly
the web master plays a fundamentalrole in the museum’s communicationand mediation tasks.
5. Other cross-cutting or ancillaryoccupations have been added to these
professions. Among these are thehead or project manager (who may be
a scientist, or a museographer) who
is responsible for all the methods for
implementing the museal activities
and who groups around him specialists in the ﬁelds of preservation,
research, and communication inorder to carry out speciﬁc projects,
such as a temporary exhibition, a
new gallery, an open reserve, etc.
6. In more general terms it is very
likely that administrators or museum
managers, who already have their own
committee in ICOM, will emphasise
the speciﬁc skills of their function by70

distinguishing it from other organisations, for proﬁt or not. The sameis true for many other administrative tasks such as logistics, security,
information technology, marketing,and media relations, which are all
growing in importance. Museum
directors (who also have associations,particularly in the United States)
have proﬁles that cover one or moreof the above proﬁciencies. They aresymbols of authority in the museum,and their proﬁle (manager or curator, for example) is often presented
as indicative of the development andaction strategy that the museum will
adopt.
CORRELATED: ANIMATOR, COMMUNICATOR,)CONSERVATION, CURATOR, CULTURAL PROJECTSCOORDINATOR, EDUCATOR, EVALUATOR, EXHIBITPRACTICE, EXHIBIT STUDIES, EXHIBITION DESIGNER,
GUARD, GUIDE, GUIDE-INTERPRETER, INTERIOR DESIGNER,
LECTURER, MANAGEMENT, MEDIATOR, MUSEOGRAPHY,
MUSEOLOGIST, MUSEOLOGY, MUSEUM PRACTICE,MUSEUM STUDIES, PROJECT MANAGER, RESEARCHER,RESTORER, SECURITY OFFICER, STAGE DESIGNER,TECHNICIAN, VOLUNTEER.

PUBLICn., adj. (Latin publicus, populus: people orpopulation) – Equivalent in French: public,
audience;
Spanish:público;German:Publikum Besucher; Italian: pubblico; Portuguese: público.

The term has two accepted meanings, according to whether it is used
as an adjective or a noun.
1. The adjective ‘public’ – as in‘public museum’ – explains the legal
relationship between the museumand the people of the area in which
it is located. The public museum isessentially the property of the people;
it is ﬁnanced and administered by thepeople through its representatives
and by delegation, through its management. This system is most strongly
present in Latin countries: the publicmuseum is essentially ﬁnanced bytaxes, and its collections are partof the logic of public ownership (inprinciple they cannot rightfully beremoved or deaccessioned, nor cantheir status be changed unless a strict
procedure is followed). The working
rules are generally those of public
services, especially the principle ofcontinuity (the service is required tooperate continuously and regularly,
with no interruptions other thanthose provided for in the regulations), the principle of mutability (theservice must adapt to changes in theneeds of the general public interest,
and there should be no legal obstacle
to changes to be made to this end),
the principle of equality (to insurethat each citizen is treated equally).
Finally the principle of transparency(communication of documents about
the service to anyone who requests
them, and the reasons for certain
decisions) signiﬁes that the museal
establishment is open to all andbelongs to all; it is at the service ofsociety and its development.
In Anglo-American law the prevailing notion is less that of public
service than that of public trust,
principles which demand that thetrustees have a strict commitment to

the museum, generally organised as a
private enterprise with the status ofa non-proﬁt organisation, and thatthe activities of the board of trustees
are aimed at a certain public. This
museum’s main point of reference,
particularly in the United States, ismore an idea of community than thatof public, the term community often
being taken in a very wide sense (seeSociety).
This principle of public interest
causes museums worldwide to see
their activities carried out, if notunder the aegis of public authorities, then at least with reference tothem, and most often to be partly
run by these authorities, which inturn obliges museums to respect
a number of rules which inﬂuence
their administration and a numberof ethical principles. In this context
the question of the private museum
and that of the museum managed as
a commercial enterprise allows theassumption that the different principles connected with state ownershipand the nature of public authorities mentioned above would not be
encountered. It is from this perspective that the ICOM deﬁnition of
museum presupposes that it is a nonproﬁt organisation, and that many of
the articles of its code of ethics havebeen drafted according to its public
nature.
2. As a noun the word ‘public’ refers
to the museum users (the museum
public), but also, by extension fromits actual user public, to the wholeof the population addressed by the71establishment. The notion of public
is central to almost all of the current
deﬁnitions of museum: “institution… at the service of society and its
development, open to the public”(ICOM, 2007). It is also a “collection … the conservation and display of which are of public interestand intended for public knowledge,
education and enjoyment” (Law on
the museums of France, 2002), or
again “an institution which owns
and uses material objects, preserves
them and exhibits them to the public
according to regular opening hours”(American Association of Museums,
Accreditation Program, 1973); thedeﬁnition published in 1998 by theMuseums Association (UK) replaced
the adjective ‘public’ with the noun‘people’.
The very notion of public closely
associates the museum activities with
its users, even those who are intended
to beneﬁt from it but do not use its services. By users we mean of course thevisitors – the public at large – about
whom we think ﬁrst of all, forgettingthat they have not always played thecentral role that the museum recognises today, because there are many
speciﬁc publics. Museums have opened up to everyone only gradually,
being ﬁrst of all a place for artistic
training and for the territory of thelearned and scholarly. This opening,which has led museum staff to takean increasing interest in all its visitors and also in the population that
does not visit museums, has fostered
the growth of ways of interpreting72

the museum to all the users, as we
can see by the new words used overtime: people, public at large, nonpublic, distant public, disabled or
frail; users, visitors, observers, spectators, consumers, audience, etc. The
development of the professional ﬁeldof exhibition critics, many of whompresent themselves as “public advocates” or “for the voice of the public”,
is evidence of this current tendency
to reinforce the idea that the public is
at the core of general museum operations. Essentially since the end of the
1980s we talk of a real “turn towards
the public” in museal action, to show
the growing importance of museum
visits and take account of the needs
and expectations of visitors (whichcorresponds to what we also call“the commercial trend of museums”,
even if the two do not necessarily go
together).
3. By extension, in the models ofcommunity museums and ecomuseums, the public has been extended
to cover the whole of the populationin the areas in which they are set.
The population is the basis of themuseum and in the case of the ecomuseum, it becomes the main player
and no longer the target of the establishment (see Society).
Z DERIVATIVES: DISABLED PUBLIC, MINORITY PUBLIC,
NON-PUBLIC, PUBLIC AT LARGE, PUBLIC RELATIONS,
PUBLICITY, TARGET PUBLIC.
CORRELATED: AUDIENCE, ASSESSMENTS,)
COMMUNITY, CUSTOMERS, ECOMUSEUM, EVALUATION,EVALUATORS, LOYALTY BUILDING, PEOPLE, POPULATION,PRIVATE, SOCIETY, SPECTATORS, ENQUIRIES, TOURISTS,
USERS, VISITING, VISITORS.

RRESEARCHn. – Equivalent in French: recherche; Spanish:
investigación; German: Forschung; Italian:ricerca; Portuguese: pesquisa, investigaçāo.

Research consists of exploring predeﬁned ﬁelds with the purpose ofadvancing the knowledge of theseand the action it is possible to carryout in these ﬁelds. In the museum,research consists of the intellectual
activities and work aimed at discovery, invention, and the advancementof new knowledge connected withthe museum collections, or the activities it carries out.
1. Until 2007 ICOM presented
research in the French (and ofﬁcial) version of the deﬁnition of
museum, as the driving force behind
its functioning, the objective of themuseum being to carry out researchon the material evidence of man andsociety, which is why the museum“acquires, conserves, and exhibits”
this evidence. This formal deﬁnition which presented the museum
as a kind of laboratory (open to the
public) no longer represents museal
reality today, since a large part of
the research such as was carried out
in the last third of the 20th century
has been moved from museums tolaboratories and universities. Now

the museum “acquires, conserves,
researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity” (ICOM, 2007).
This deﬁnition, shorter than theprevious one (and with the term “faitdes recherches” [does research] in
French replaced by “étudier” [study])
nonetheless remains essential to thegeneral operations of the museum.
Research is one of the three activities of the PRC model (Preservation– Research – Communication) proposed by the Reinwardt Academie(Mensch, 1992) to deﬁne the functioning of museums; it appears to bea fundamental element for thinkers
as different as Zbyněk Stránský or
Georges Henri Rivière, and manyother museologists from central andeastern Europe, such as Klaus Schreiner. At the Musée national des Arts
et traditions populaires (The National Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions), and more precisely throughhis works on l’Aubrac, Rivière perfectly illustrated the repercussionsof the scientiﬁc research programme
for all the functions of a museum, inparticular its acquisition, publicationand exhibition policies.
2. Aided by market mechanisms
which have favoured temporary
exhibitions to the detriment of per73

manent ones, part of the fundamental research has been replaced by amore applied research, particularlyin the preparation of temporary
exhibitions. Research within the framework of the museum or attached
to it can be classiﬁed into four categories (Davallon, 1995), according
to whether it is part of the operations of the museum (its technology)
or produces knowledge about themuseum.
The ﬁrst type of research, certainly the most developed, is direct
evidence of traditional museal activity and is based on the museum’s
collections, relying essentially on
the reference disciplines connected with the content of the collections (history of art, history, naturalsciences, etc.). The building of classiﬁcation systems, inherent to thebuilding of a collection and productive of catalogues, was one of theforemost research priorities within
the museum, particularly in naturalscience museums (this is the essenceof taxonomy), but also in museumsof ethnography, archaeology and ofcourse ﬁne art.
The second type of research involves sciences and disciplines which
lie outside the realm of museology(physics, chemistry, communication74

sciences, etc.), pursued in order todevelop tools for museum practice(considered here as museal techniques): material and standards forconservation, study or restoration,
surveys of the public, management
methods, etc.
The aim of the third type of
research, which can be calledmuseological (for example, museal
ethics), is to stimulate thought
about the mission and operations ofmuseums – especially through thework of ICOFOM. The disciplines
involved are essentially philosophy
and history, or museology as deﬁned
by the Brno school.
Finally, the fourth type of research,which can also be seen as museological (understood as all critical thought
connected with the museal) addresses analysis of the institution, in particular through its communicationand heritage aspects. The sciences
mobilised for building up knowledge
about the museum itself are history,
anthropology, sociology and linguistics, etc.
Z DERIVATIVES: MUSEOLOGICAL RESEARCH CENTRE,RESEARCHER.
CORRELATED: CURATOR, COMMUNICATION,)
MUSEOLOGY, MUSEUM STUDIES, PRESERVATION,SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME OF THE MUSEUM, STUDY.

S
SOCIET Y
n. – Equivalent in French: société; Spanish:sociedad; German: Gesellschaft, Bevölkerung; Italian: società; Portuguese: sociedade.

In its most general sense, societyis the human group understoodas a more or less coherent whole
in which systems of relationships
and exchange are established. The
society addressed by museums canbe deﬁned as a community of individuals (in a speciﬁc place at a speciﬁc time) organised around common
political, economic, legal and cultural institutions, of which the museum
is a part and with which it builds its
activities.
1. Since 1974 the museum has beenviewed by ICOM – following thedeclaration of Santiago de Chile – asan institution “in the service ofsociety and its development”. This
proposal, historically determined by
the birth of the expression “developing country” and its identiﬁcation
during the 1970s as a third group ofcountries between western and eastern countries, sees the museum as anagent for the development of society,whether this be culture (the use of
the term going so far as to include its
literal meaning at this time of agri-

cultural development) or tourism
and economy, as is the case today. In
this sense society can be understoodas all the inhabitants of one or morecountries, or even the entire world.
This is the case for UNESCO, theinternational promoter most committed to the maintenance and development of cultures and the respectof cultural diversity, as well as tothe development of educational systems – a category in which museums
willingly take their place.
2. If on ﬁrst sight society can bedeﬁned as a community structured
by institutions, the concept of community itself differs from that ofsociety, since a community is a groupof people living collectively or forming an association, sharing a number of things in common (language,
religion, customs) without necessarily gathering around institutional
structures. More generally speaking,society and community are generally
differentiated by their assumed size:
the term community is generally
used to deﬁne smaller and morehomogeneous groups (the Jewish
community, the gay community, etc.,
in a city or in a country), whereas theterm society is often used in the caseof much larger and necessarily more75

heterogeneous groups of people (thesociety of this country, bourgeois
society). More precisely, the term
community, regularly used in AngloAmerican countries, does not havea true equivalent in French since it
represents “A collection of constituents or stakeholders 1) audiences,
2) scholars, 3) other public interpreters, e.g. Press, interpretative
artists, 4) program providers – arts
groups, etc, 5) repositories, including libraries, preservation agencies,
museums” (American Association ofMuseums, 2002). The term is translated in French either by collectivité or
population locale or communauté (ina restricted sense), or also by milieu
professionel.
3. Two types of museums– social
museums and community museums –have been developed in recent decades in order to emphasise the speciﬁc
connection that these museums wish
to build with their public. These
museums, traditionally ethnographic museums, present themselves
as establishments which have strong
ties with their public, who is at thecentre of their work. Although thenature of their respective objectives
is similar, their management stylediffers, as does their relation withthe public. The term social museums

76

includes “museums which share thesame objective: to study the evolution of humanity in its social andhistorical components, and to transmit the staging posts, the points ofreference, for understanding thediversity of cultures and societies”(Vaillant, 1993). These objectives
establish the museum as a truly interdisciplinary space and can produce
exhibitions addressing subjects as
varied as the BSE crisis, immigration, ecology etc. The operation ofcommunity museums, which canbe part of the movement of social
museums, is more directly related
to the social, cultural, professionalor geographical group which they
represent and which is meant to sustain them. Although often professionally managed, they may also rely on
local initiative alone and the spirit ofgiving. The issues they address touchdirectly on the functioning and identity of this community; this is particularly the case for neighbourhood
museums and ecomuseums.
Z DERIVATIVES: SOCIAL MUSEUMS, SOCIETY
MUSEUMS.
CORRELATED: COMMUNITY, COMMUNITY)DEVELOPMENT, COMMUNITY MUSEUM, DEVELOPMENT
PROGRAMME, ECOMUSEUM, IDENTITY, LOCAL,NEIGHBOURHOOD MUSEUM, PUBLIC.

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