The first survey of university museums in Thailand

Abstract

The first university in Thailand was founded in 1917. After nearly a century, the number of universities has risen to 120 in 2012. These universities have established a diverse variety of museums in order to accomplish their specific missions. There have not however been any reviews of university museums in Thailand. Therefore, this study aimed to accumulate basic information about Thailand’s university museums in terms of general characteristics, administrative structure, current status and limitations; the results of this can be analyzed for trends and suggest not only the current status of the university museum sector, but also avenues for new lines of enquiry. Introduction Since the founding of the first university in Thailand in 1917, the number of universities has risen to 120 in 2012 (OHEC 2012). Within many of these universities are university museums, yet there has never been a review of university museums in Thailand before the present study. The aim of this survey is to collate and understand this sector in terms of characteristics, administrative structure, current status and limitations. To accomplish the objective, basic information about university museums was initially roughly extracted from two sources: (a) the Local Museum Database and (b) by exploring university websites. Thereafter, specific information was collected by mail, phone or personal communication. Only 71 out of 120 universities were identified as having their own museum(s). Universities lacking a museum are usually younger than 20 year-old, so might not have enough resources to establish a museum. Despite the low number of museum-hosting universities, the number of museums was high; 171 university museums were identified. For the purpose of this survey the museums were divided into six categories, namely Humanities & Social Science, Arts, Natural History, Science & Technology, Memorial Hall & Archive and Biography. As a result of the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment’s (ONESQA) policy, anthropological museums, sub-category of Humanities, contributed the largest number. The ONESQA has set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to assess quality of universities in Thailand (ONESQA 2012). One of the KPIs indicators is the level of culture promotion, accordingly, many universities established museum-like ‘cultural centers’ to respond this KPI. In addition, the result showed that the number of museums in a university potentially corresponded to the university’s ranking; the more museums, the better rank. Furthermore, as will be discussed in this paper, the survey revealed that most museums lack good organization and get insufficient of human resources and adequate funding. However, the lack of policy, knowledge and experience also causes significant problems. More understanding about museum management, clear operating policies and collaboration between institutes are needed to solve this situation. Methods Initially, basic information of university museums in Thailand was collated from an existing database. In 2005, the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropological Centre published a database of museums in Thailand called Local Museum Database. This online database gathered information of local museums from multimedia, including newspapers, magazines, brochures and webpages. It groups museums by several criteria, including content, location and responsible person. By using responsible person criteria, university museums are put together with school museums into a group of