NPR had a story last week about museum collections on-line (both professional and avocational). Central to the story was MoOM, the Museum of On-line Museums, which gathers links to favored sites (from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam to a collection of whistling records). The story explored whether any curated, on-line aggregation of content is worthy of the name ”museum,” or whether there were other essential ingredients required to earn the term.
Merriam-Webster provides two definitions for the word museum: ”an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value,” and ”a place where objects are exhibited.”
[Jim] Coudal of MoOM likes the latter definition. ”The choosing to display is what makes a museum, [and] the taste of the curator” he says. ”The curation makes the museum.”
Wilson O’Donnell, director of the museology program at the University of Washington in Seattle, supports the first definition, suggesting that scholarship, training, and academic rigor are essential elements of both being a curator and being a museum.
Of course, unlike French, English doesn’t have an official language police to make a final determination on the term ”museum.” But if I were a bricks-and-mortar museum director, faced with growing competition and confusion from collections on-line, I’d want to be as curious, clear, and concise as I could be about what made my organization particularly worthy of the word.
The dictionary needs an updating as it omits a key function which is that museums are educational institutions. Display is very passive while today museums are engaging their public and their communities to learn from their collections. Collections can be stories and combined with artefacts they create an educational experience.
Tom