Idea Of Museum Research Articles

The Peace Museums of Japan

In the past twenty years the peace museum idea has blossomed and the Japanese contribution has been both remarkable and inspirational for other countries. ‘Peace cities’ like Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorate the atomic bomb legacy, while a new generation of Japanese peace museums is confronting the past with programming which is refreshingly global. Dr Duffy, who heads the Human Rights Programme at Magee College in Northern Ireland, offers a personal view of ‘peace museum’ trends in Japan.

The peace museums of Japan

In the past twenty years the peace museum idea has blossomed and the Japanese contribution has been both remarkable and inspirational for other countries. ‘Peace cities’ like Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorate the atomic bomb legacy, while a new generation of Japanese peace museums is confronting the past with programming which is refreshingly global. Dr Duffy, who heads the Human Rights Programme at Magee College in Northern Ireland, offers a personal view of ‘peace museum’ trends injapan.

The Genesis of Sir John Soane's Museum Idea: 1801-1810

This article traces the early building history of Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, prior to its erection in 1809. Various unpublished drawings and manuscripts in the Soane collection establish the germ of the idea for the London museum nearly a decade earlier in an unrealized project for a specially designed gallery at Soane's villa in Ealing for his architectural collection. A series of designs leading up to the 1809 museum plan are here published for the first time. It is further shown how this pre-eminent British architect's museum idea represented a lifelong ambition to elevate the status of architecture and to establish an architectural dynasty. In the course of pursuing these twin goals, the architect created a uniquely eccentric private house-museum which became a public trust only four years before the architect's death.

Danse macabre i musernas hus – om museernas roll och villkor idag

Danse macabre on the museum scene – notes on the decline and fall of the museum idea The museum idea in Europe is closely linked to the concept of the nation state. Now that this concept is losing its dominant role, the role of the museum and its public funding is also being questioned. The crisis in societal credibility is foreshadowed by the real or imminent bankruptcy of museums (specific Danish and Swedish instances are quoted in the text). The battle to regain public confidence and approval is well under way. The scene is set for the danse macabre. Different methods are being chosen. Many museums cling to their traditional functions of preservation and education – and their pedagogical work is most easily accepted, encouraged and subsidized when the space for history teaching in compulsory school is continuously shrinking. Others concentrate on acquiring sponsoring from trade and industry and of course seek support from various foundations. A regrouping of Swedish national collections was suggested as early as 1920 by Gregor Paulsson to better adapt the museum institution to the needs of contemporary society – into a quality museum (for the general public), a study museum (for researchers) and a museum of the present (to serve the need of future orientation). This was a proposal that pointed the way forward and is still relevant.The crisis in the museums is principally political and financial resulting in an institutional lack of resoluteness and uncertainty about purpose and societal legitimacy. To survive it will be necessary to acknowledge the end of the national saga and the reality of cybernations and the Dream World, Museums could find their raison d’être serving as dynamic houses of culture, as Kenneth Hudson suggested in the 1980s. The institutions should accept the museum as medium and think of themselves as process-oriented entities whose job it is to support and inspire their communities and visitors/users. They should obviously adapt to the virtual reality produced in a dynamic digital process where the content is similar to an open oral tradition. The museum should be the cultural storyteller and commentator in its community and tradi- tional museum education should be given up in favour of these new roles. According to Kenneth Hudson the museum should become a club, or perhaps – as Bernard Déloche suggests – a café philosophique. Another possible way forward is such cooperation as that pro- moted in the ABM project where archive, library and museum are amalgamated into a historical workshop. For the e-topia imagined by William Mitchell the paper concludes with conceiving a museum of the future consisting of a physical building supplemented and expanded to a virtual museum.

Agricultural Museums?

THE Agricultural History Society (Washington, D.C.) was founded in 1919 “to stimulate interest in, to promote the study of, and to facilitate research and publication on the history of agriculture”. In Vol. 19 (July 1945) of the Society's quarterly journal Agricultural History, Herbert A. Kellar has contributed a paper on “Living Agricultural Museums”, in which he shows how much the museum may do to promote the aims of the Society. Notable progress has been made in the museum idea since 1920, particularly as regards the importance attached to accuracy, the introduction of motion into the exhibits and the recognition of the necessity for an appropriate setting for the objects. As an illustration of the latter, he describes a recreated village typical of rather more than a century ago that has been set up near Springfield, Illinois, where no modern effects are allowed to detract from the reality of the scene. His conception of a national agricultural museum is particularly ambitious, as he envisages an institution where not only the historical and social aspects of agriculture should be portrayed by means of exhibits, but which should also act as headquarters of important national farm organisations, and serve as a centre for educational activities, with special library and theatre attached. Branch museums specializing in matters of local interest, such as the Farmers Museum sponsored by the New York Historical Association at Cooperstown, are suggested as extensions of the central unit. Here exhibits of both indoor and outdoor forms of agricultural operations might well be compared with those of earlier periods, illustrating, for example, the evolution of machinery, transportation, milling, tanning or other processes.

THE NORWEGIAN-AMERICAN HISTORICAL MUSEUM

THE NORWEGIAN-AMERICAN HISTORICAL MUSEUM By Knut Gjerset Decorah, Iowa, was the first great center of Norwegian pioneer settlement west of the Mississippl. It is noted for its scenic beauty and is surrounded by the large and prosperous Norwegian settlements of southern Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and northern Iowa, in one of the most productive agricultural regions in the United States. Two railroads, the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, and the Rock Island enter Decorah, and the city is traversed by several fine highways. One of these is federal highway number 55, the shortest route and the one richest in scenery of those between Chicago and the Twin Cities, a road that is becoming a leading bus route and that will soon be paved throughout its entire length. Luther College, the oldest Norwegian college in America, was built in Decorah in the years of the Civil War. It is a college of high scholastic standing. It has fine buildings, and endowments have been large. It has a library of fifty thousand volumes housed in a new and adequate building. This library possesses the largest collection of NorwegianAmerican newspapers in the country, a most important source of information regarding this group. It also contains an archive department embracing, among other valuable records, about eleven thousand classified letters and documents that have been collected in the Norwegian settlements . About forty years ago, several teachers at Luther College who felt that the memory of their pioneer fathers and mothers should not be forgotten began collecting pioneer objects that had been preserved in the homes of early settlers. Hal153 154 STUDIES AND RECORDS dor Hanson, professor of music, became interested and spent much energy and a large part of his personal income in this work. Very little planning was at first noticeable in these efforts, and slight support was received from the college administration, but the collections continued to grow and thus a small museum was gradually created that was known as the Luther College Museum. In 1922 the present director was placed in charge of these collections. He found that the field offered an inviting opportunity for creating collections that would prove a valuable supplement to the historical material about Norwegian settlers in America to be found in the libraries of Luther College and of St. Olaf College, in the archives of state historical societies in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and in other repositories. He felt that archival material should be collected as extensively as possible and that a NorwegianAmerican historical museum should be created which would help one to visualize the living conditions and activities of the Norwegians who have come to dwell in America. In the summer of 1925, after the Norse-American Centennial celebration in St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the director had been in charge of a Norwegian-American cultural exhibition, he took definite steps to effect the realization of the museum idea. As an organization would be needed for the promotion of the plan, and as the establishing of a Norwegian-American historical association had for some time been discussed in the press, he advocated the merging of the two projects and the organization of an historical association which would help to maintain and develop a Norwegian-American historical museum. He asked a small group of men who were interested to meet in Decorah, and presented to them a preliminary program for such an association . With their advice and assistance he spent a part of the summer traveling about, acquainting leading men with the proposed program, and securing their opinions of the The Outdoor Museum THE NORWEGIAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM 1 55 plan. All expressed their interest and their willingness to cooperate, and in the fall of that year a meeting was called at St. Olaf College at Northfield, Minnesota, where the Norwegian- American Historical Association was organized, with a program essentially the same as the one presented at the preliminary meeting in Decorah, Iowa. When the association was incorporated, its "general plan of operation," under the terms of its charter, was "to obtain by gift and from membership contributions the funds required for" certain stated purposes, including that of " helping to maintain and develop the Norwegian- American Museum at Decorah...

The New Museum Outlook

THE museums of Great Britain are bestirring themselves, or, if that be putting it too strongly, at any rate many men of action and foresight are bestirring themselves concerning the museums. There is a museum feeling in the air. But in the midst of the reports and commissions, addresses and discussions which express this activity, the plain man may be excused if he fails to see that criticisms, suggestions, and counter-suggestions all point to a broad but tolerably well-defined road by which the museums of the British Isles must endeavour to make their way. The new road is the focus of many independent paths along which progressive museums have been feeling their way in recent years, often in face of difficulties, and scarcely realising that they were taking part in one of the great educational movements of the times. Though the reports have scarcely emphasised the magnitude of the change, it means a radical recasting of the museum idea and the adoption of a fresh museum outlook.

Museums Association

II. THESE are the principles of what may be called the New Museum idea as applied to national museums of natural history. It is a remarkable coincidence that since they were first enunciated, and during the time of their discussion, but before they had met with anything like universal acceptance, the four first nations of Europe almost simultaneously erected in their respective capitals—London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin—entirely new buildings on a costly, even palatial scale, to receive the natural history collections, which in each case had quite outgrown their previous insufficient accommodation. In the construction of neither of these four edifices can the guardians of the public purse be accused of want of liberality. Each building is a monument in itself of the appreciation of the government of the country of the value and interest of the natural history sciences. So far this is most satisfactory. Now that each is more or less completed, at all events for the present, and its contents in a fair way towards a permanent arrangement, it may not be without interest on the present occasion to give some comparative account of their salient features, especially with a view to ascertain whether and to what extent their construction and arrangement have complied with the requirements of the modern idea of such institutions.