Portal:Museums

The National Press Monument (Indonesian: Monumen Pers Nasional) is a monument and museum to the national Indonesian press. Formally established in 1978, more than 20 years after it was first proposed, the monument is located in Surakarta, Central Java, and operated by the Ministry of Communications and Informatics. The complex consists of an old society building, which was constructed in 1918 and used for the first meeting of the Indonesian Journalists Association (Persatuan Wartawan Indonesia, or PWI), as well as several subsequent expansions; it is listed as a cultural property of Indonesia.

The National Press Monument has a collection of over a million newspapers and magazines, as well as a variety of exhibitions and artefacts related to the history of the press in Indonesia. Facilities include a multimedia room, free-to-read newspapers, and a library. It is promoted as a site for educational tourism through various exhibitions and Facebook, and in 2013 it was visited by over 26,000 people. (Full article...)

A museum/library/archival registrar is responsible for implementing policies and procedures that relate to caring for collections of cultural institutions like archives, libraries, and museums. These policies are found in the museum's collections policy, the guiding tenet of the museum explaining why the institution is in operation, dictating the museum's professional standards regarding the objects left in its care. Registrars focus on sections that include acquisitions, loans, exhibitions, deaccessions, storage, packing and shipping, security of objects in transit, insurance policies, and risk management.

As a collections care professional, they work with collection managers, conservators, and curators to balance public access to objects with the conditions needed to maintain preservation. Focusing on documentation, registrars are responsible for developing and maintaining records management systems, with individual files for each object in the collection. Smaller and mid-sized institutions may combine the role of registrar with that of collections manager, while large institutions often have multiple registrars, each overseeing a different curatorial department. (Full article...)

• ... that Boston's World's Museum was a theatre, an aquarium, a menagerie, and a freak show?
• ... that Audrey Hawthorn volunteered as curator while spending more than 20 years establishing a museum of anthropology?
• ... that Josèphe Jacquiot founded a museum that was named in her honour?
• ... that a haniwa horse in Tokyo National Museum is of particular significance due to its horse trappings?
• ... that American professor Emerson Charles Denny co-published the Nelson–Denny Reading Test in 1930, which has parts held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History?
• ... that the Paul Delvaux Museum exhibits not only Paul Delvaux's paintings, but also a collection of model trains?

For editor resources and to collaborate with other editors on improving Wikipedia's Museums-related articles, see WikiProject Museums.

Cabinets of curiosities (German: Kunstkammer [ˈkʊnstˌkamɐ] and Kunstkabinett [ˈkʊnstkabiˌnɛt]), also known as wonder-rooms (German: Wunderkammer [ˈvʊndɐˌkamɐ] ^ⓘ), were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Although more rudimentary collections had preceded them, the classic cabinets of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century. The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums.

Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular interests of their curators but also as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society. There are said to be two main types of cabinets. As R. J. W. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes." Evans goes on to explain that "no clear distinction existed between the two categories: all collecting was marked by curiosity, shading into credulity, and by some sort of universal underlying design". (Full article...)

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