The research museum – a place of integrated knowledge production

The Leibniz vision and mission of the integrated research museum

The Leibniz Association today connects 96 independent research institutions that range in focus from natural, engineering and environmental sciences to economics, spatial, and social sciences and the humanities. One of the main characteristics that distinguish the Leibniz Association from the other three large-scale organisations of non-university research in Germany – the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer Society, and the Helmholtz Association – is the inclusion of member institutions which produce and disseminate collections-based knowledge, namely the following eight Leibniz research museums: Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum – Leibniz Research Museum for Georesources; Deutsches Museum; Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History; Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg – Leibniz Research Museum for Cultural History; Museum für Naturkunde Berlin – Leibniz Institute for Evolution und Biodiversity Research; Römisch-Germanische Zentralmuseum in Mainz – Leibniz Research Institute for Archaeology; Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung in Frankfurt/Main – Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research; Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change in Bonn and Hamburg – Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig.  

These eight Leibniz research museums share a joint vision and mission.^[4] They combine cutting-edge research at a high international level, significant scientific collections as research infrastructures, and innovative modes of public knowledge mediation and communication. Through the close interconnection of these three areas, the Leibniz research museums aim to actively address societal and global challenges and develop future-oriented options for action. They explore and preserve the natural, technical and cultural heritage of humankind as knowledge repositories to answer questions about the past, present and future. They understand themselves as authentic places of science, and through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research they promote scholarship and develop young scholars in the fields of collection-based research. Moreover, they provide orientation and action knowledge as a basis for decision-making in politics, economy and society.

The Leibniz research museums are genuine places of dialogue, science communication and public mediation. In Germany they occupy a central role as extracurricular educational and learning spaces, fostering identity and social cohesion. With a science communication strategy focused on participation and inclusion, the museums reach a broad and diverse audience, and can inspire and raise awareness among people of different ages, cultural, and social backgrounds about socially relevant issues. They enable participation in research processes, promote a deeper understanding of the fragility of scientific knowledge, and strengthen critical thinking and judgment as essential competencies in a democratic knowledge society. Moreover, they see themselves as pace-setters for the promotion of the integrated research museum concept worldwide. Their living triad of research, collection and mediation/communication is a unique feature unmatched by universities and other academic institutions. Operating across a broad disciplinary spectrum, connecting the humanities, cultural sciences and natural sciences, they pursue an integrative holistic approach to knowledge production. 

Over the last ten years, by sharing these visions, missions and goals, the Leibniz research museums have started to pool their resources and collaborate closely on multiple levels. To solidify and extend their collaboration, they have created the governance model of coordinated cooperation. In two consecutive multiannual ‘action plans’,^[5] they have produced numerous collaborative products such as joint exhibitions, outreach activities, visitor research programmes and scholarly conferences. As will be shown later in this article, they have also begun to disseminate their vision of the integrated research museum to the global community of museums. 

Integrated research at the Deutsches Museum

International experts have identified a particular ‘Munich style’, integrating the research infrastructures of the collections, archives, and the library, academically oriented research, and public mediation in galleries, exhibits and in communication programmes (e.g. Fox, 1998; Jørgensen and Jørgensen, 2016). This Munich style is manifested in seven characteristics:  

1. Following the Leibniz model, research infrastructures, research, and mediation/communication are closely connected and strategically intertwined. Accordingly, the Museum understands exhibitions and associated communication formats, such as visitor laboratories, as a specific form of scientific ‘publication’ within a spatial setting. Galleries and exhibits are fostered by prospective, accompanying, and follow-up research. They are supported by organisational research infrastructures, produce project-specific research and this, in turn, inspires the development of new scientific ideas, questions and concepts. 
2. Maintaining a high-performance research infrastructure is essential for the quality of both exhibitions and research. With its internationally unique collections, its national research library for the history of science and technology, its specialised archives for science and technology, and ‘Deutsches Museum Digital’ – a digital information platform integrating these resources – the Museum provides both analogue and digital infrastructures open to a wide range of user groups. 
3. The Museum serves as a bridge between science and the public. It aims to deepen the public understanding of the nature of research-as-process and the relationship between society and knowledge creation. This goal includes highlighting the open, fragile and often controversial nature of science by presenting various scientific and social perspectives on science and technology. Complementing these approaches, especially in permanent galleries, the Museum has created experimental spaces for new forms of interactive science communication and participatory public engagement. These spaces include transforming the Museum’s branch at Bonn into a Museum for Artificial Intelligence, establishing the Deutsches Museum at Nuremberg as a Museum of the Future for Science and Technology, opening (in 2022) the Science Communication Lab at the Museum’s main premises in Munich as a multi-functional space for co-creation, and establishing the Future Forum, a project for the transformation of the congress hall currently under development.

   

   Explore this image

4. The Museum’s ‘Munich style’ is also marked by its close integration into academic research and teaching. Strategic partnerships with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) grants access to qualified early-career researchers and in turn incorporates the Museum’s unique resources into academic research and teaching. These long-standing institutional collaborations are grounded in joint appointments of the Museum’s leadership personnel, who hold chairs in university departments; in institutional collaborations such as the Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society; in joint labs such as the TUMlab for adolescents and students and the Science Communication Lab in collaboration with LMU; and in numerous joint research projects.
5. The collaboration within the Leibniz Association has grown significantly in importance over the last decade. The Deutsches Museum is strongly involved in multiple collaborative research programmes, working groups, networks and projects across the board. Of particular importance are the ‘action plans’ of the Leibniz research museums, a cooperative platform to explore and develop innovative mediation, dialogue and engagement formats for various target groups.
6. The Museum’s profile connects the temporal dimensions of past, present and future at the level of reflective research and in mediation through galleries and programmes. Research addressing science in the making or ‘unfinished science’ (Shapin, 1992; Durand, 2004), such as Artificial Intelligence and digital cultures, are explored in their scientific, technical, historical and cultural contexts. This also applies to visions of future technologies, which are analysed in their historical formation and connected to current debates on technological futures. The research findings feed into the Museum’s mediation activities on all levels, including exhibitions that interrelate historical, contemporary and future-oriented topics.
7. Finally, the Museum’s ‘Munich style’ approach emphasises the complementary nature of national research and mediation efforts with international impact. Its international strategy comprises long-established patterns and forums of cross-national cooperation. One example of this is the Artefacts network,^[6] co-founded in 1996 by the author on behalf of the Deutsches Museum in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the Science Museum in London to promote object-based research. Today Artefacts includes nearly all major science and technology museums worldwide — supporting innovative programmes and publishing on current museum practice for transnational scientific exchange.^[7]

In line with the Leibniz vision the Deutsches Museum research programme is divided into three interlinked areas: Research Infrastructure, Research, and Mediation/Communication; Research Infrastructure includes the Archives, the Library, the Collections and Deutsches Museum Digital; Mediation/Communication comprises Exhibitions, Visitor Laboratories and Educational Programmes as well as Digital Programmes. 

Research itself is distributed across three further subfields: Collection-based Research embodies the close conceptual and structural coupling of researching and collecting and is further divided into Object-related Research and Conservation Science, each combining cultural and scientific concepts, theories and methods. History of Science, Technology, and Environment is further divided into the Interaction of Science, Technology, and Society, Digital Cultures of Technology, and Environmental History, each based on a mix of historical and social science approaches. Finally, Mediation-oriented Research provides theoretical and empirical research for the Museum’s mediation and communication programmes and is divided into Museological Research and Science Communication. Each of these subfields typically comprises of five to eight projects involving scholars from multiple departments of the Deutsches Museum – a total of 80 to 100 museum staff will typically be working on research in the narrower sense at any one time. While curators and communication staff mostly have dual roles, drawn in from other departments on particular projects, most staff members working in the research department are mainly concerned with scholarly projects, based on competitive third-party funds, which nevertheless feed back to the Museum’s exhibits and mediation/communication programmes. However, in a research museum, to discriminate between research and non-research branches is impractical, since all activities are research-based and integrated in the end.  

Economics has taught us that each opportunity has its costs. Thus, the present identity of the Deutsches Museum as a research museum offers not only opportunities; it also includes problems and challenges, which may be seen as typical for integrated research museums in general, at least in the field of science and technology. Five arenas of potential problems and tensions will be briefly illuminated here:  

Firstly, to balance resources: In an ideal world of unlimited resources, this problem would not exist. In the real world, museums are faced with a need to invest their very limited resources prudently. Decision-making often means an either/or: to invest time and money either in marketing activities, public outreach, new galleries or renovation of buildings; or in funding scholars, in collecting artefacts, in research infrastructures of libraries, archives and object-storage facilities, in digitisation programmes or scholarly publications.  

Secondly, research activities must steer a path between the museological and the academic poles. The workflows of academic research and knowledge production at museums are different, and so are the guiding questions, products and conceptual orientations. One of the most challenging tasks is to bridge these differences, not least to make full use of research as a means of quality control in exhibition projects.  

Thirdly, research must overcome the academic bias of performance indicators. When it comes to evaluations, museums of science and technology often encounter the problem that evaluators have a limited understanding of the scope of scholarship in museums, libraries and archives. What counts in an academically oriented view is mainly publications, often narrowly defined as articles in peer-reviewed journals. Evaluators are often reluctant to agree that object-based research and conceptual scripts for exhibitions are manifestations of scholarship of equal importance. 

Fourthly, museum research must strike a fair balance between coherence and diversity. Museums of science and technology collect and display artefacts from a multitude of scientific disciplines and fields of technology. Moreover, their scholarly expertise spreads from history and cultural studies to visitor research and conservation science. The complex task of producing large exhibition projects should be based on a broad multi-perspective and multi-disciplinary knowledge base. Such a broad knowledge base involves balancing the necessity to focus on a small number of coherent projects and the wish to leave space for the creative potential of individuals.  

Fifthly, research museums have to strike another balance: the one between collaborative project-based research and institutionally based independent research. Collaboration has a cost, too, in coordination and administration. Funding programmes tend to move towards favouring collaborative over individual, institutional research. Cuts in funding might lead to further pooling of research resources and infrastructures. It is nevertheless important for the research museum to keep its core competences and identity with a specific and unique expertise. 

To cope with these problems and challenges, the Deutsches Museum has recently created a complementary, transversal structure of research foci in addition to the rather pre-defined subfields of the established research programme. Four new, cross-departmental foci have been flexibly organised as working groups open to integrating new topics, questions and impulses, often brought into the Museum by guest researchers and fellows from its Scholars in Residence programme. These thematic foci resulted from a bottom-up process of strategizing. In one-on-one discussions between the heads of departments and curators, research ideas were identified based on the written concepts for all collection fields. These ideas were then consolidated in a second step by evaluating their potential for scholarly innovations and cross-departmental connections, ultimately resulting in the following thematic foci, each with a working group to put it into action. 

Provenance research: This working group systematically examines the origins of artefacts, clarifies cases of suspicion, and works on publications that contextualise the historical development of the collections. The working group’s aim is also to organise restitution of ethically questionable objects and make research findings publicly accessible. 

Material History – Material culture: This working group analyses the materiality and history of the collections to gain a deeper understanding of their origins and uses. Interdisciplinary methods ranging from cultural studies to material sciences are applied to further develop material history as a research field.

Models: The focus of this working group is on studying models as epistemic objects. The goal is to build a shared understanding of the multiplicity of uses of models in museum contexts, thus also contributing in a self-reflexive manner to a deeper understanding of the Museum’s institutional and cultural history. 

Digital exhibits: The goal of this working group is to develop innovative concepts for virtual exhibits that present research results in digital formats, complementing physical scientific publications. Collaboration with the digital media department promotes the integration of digital formats in the Museum’s mediation and communication programmes. 

The exhibition as generator and product of scholarship: the case of the Anthropocene gallery

Research engenders exhibition making which in turn stimulates new research. This formula is one way to express the inextricable interrelatedness of researching and exhibiting in museums (Arrhenius, Cavalli-Björkman and Lindqvist, 2008). Another, complementary way is to understand the exhibition both as generator and product of scholarship (Lehmann-Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010). Whether such ideal types – in Max Weber’s terms – of intra-institutional knowledge transmission match with real types of museological workflow, is a crucial issue for the integrated research museum.  

A case in point to prove the epistemic link between researching and exhibiting is the gallery Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands, displayed at the Deutsches Museum from December 2014 to September 2016.^[8]Why is it that the Deutsches Museum became the home for the world’s first large-scale special exhibition solely dedicated to the Anthropocene? Of primary importance was, first, the expertise and networks of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, an international research centre in the field of the Environmental Humanities, founded by Christof Mauch and Helmuth Trischler as a collaboration of LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum. Secondly it has been a longstanding tradition of the Museum to explore environmental issues.  

In the course of the 1990s the Deutsches Museum started to ‘green’ by including a range of exhibitions on environmental topics (Kernbach). In 1992, the year of the United Nations Conference on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro, it opened a gallery called Environment. One decade later and triggered by developing scientific findings and public discussions on climate change, the Museum presented a special exhibition – Climate: The Experiment with the Planet Earth (Hauser, 2002). This gallery dealt mostly with the scientific background of climate change. Subthemes included worldwide networks for measuring and gathering data, meteorology, historical technological ideas for influencing climate, and natural catastrophes resulting from climate change. The gallery also included a historical review of human reactions to climate variability in the past and present. The underlying idea was that nature and technology could no longer be viewed separately, but were interdependent. It was this thinking that created the conditions for the Anthropocene exhibition. 

Drawing on insights from a wide range of scholarly disciplines, the exhibition team, led by Nina Möllers and Helmuth Trischler, decided to use the concept of an ‘Usworld’ (translated from the German Unswelt) advocated by the geologist Reinhold Leinfelder (Leinfelder et al, 2012). This notion of ‘Us’ makes it difficult to separate nature and culture, and forces thinking within a hybrid nature-culture world. The ‘Usworld’ approach blends nature, culture, technology and society into a hybridised perspective, an Anthropocene imaginary, compatible with the original mission of the Deutsches Museum and also with the expectations of its twenty-first century visitors.  

Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands opened to the public on 5 December 2014 and covered 1,450 square metres (c. 15,600 square feet). It aimed to inform visitors about the Anthropocene as a current concept that shows the effects of humanity as a biological and geological actor and the extent of planetary changes, using the three-dimensional space of a gallery. In the end more than 300,000 visitors actually experienced the Anthropocene, while learning about the current state of scientific knowledge and debate. The curators instigated an internal survey to find out what audiences already knew about the Anthropocene. While 80 per cent of those interviewed supported the idea that the Museum should engage with ‘controversial topics’, an even greater number (86 per cent) had not previously heard of the Anthropocene. Many were interested in environmental issues and saw the impacts of industry as bad for the environment (Bäuerlein and Förg, 2012). 

Explore this image

Traditional museum artefacts were not easy to incorporate into this kind of exhibition. When it came to narrating interesting stories and finding an ‘Anthropocene moment’, things became messy. In the end, the curators elected to cope with the complex messiness of Anthropocene concepts by using key objects as navigation aids. A case in point (quite literally) was the ‘Wardian case’, a special wood and glass box that was used to transplant plants around the globe. In 1829, the surgeon and amateur naturalist Nathanial Bagshaw Ward had accidentally discovered that plants enclosed in airtight glass cases can survive for long periods without watering. After the successful transport of plants to Australia and back to Europe, the Wardian case was used for over a century to carry hundreds of thousands of plants around the globe.  

The Wardian case resolved a major obstacle in the transport of live plant species but also had major consequences for environmental relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biologists working on the theme of biological globalisation have reserved a special place for the case and so has the curator, Luke Keogh. Based on his object-related studies for the exhibition, Keogh continued to research in numerous archives around the globe and ended up publishing a material biography of the Wardian case as a container and carrier of the Anthropocene (Keogh, 2020).

Explore this image

The gallery was based on intense research provided by the curatorial team and supporting fellows and staff from the Rachel Carson Center, which resulted in numerous publications.^[9]It also became a springboard for follow-up projects. One of these resulted in a cabinet-like exhibition added to the gallery Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, which opened in July 2015. Based on a collaboration with the Center for Culture, History and Environment at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and the Environmental Humanities Lab at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, scholars and artists were invited to a workshop, organised like a ‘science slam’, to select objects which might be included in an Anthropocene cabinet of curiosities. The outcome of the slam was then ‘translated’ into the cabinet, which combined exhibits on wondrous and curious relics with films and sound bites to display the different forces that shape relationships between environment and society. It also resulted in a volume that narrated the histories of the objects on display (Armiero, Emmett and Mitman, 2019). 

The Anthropocene exhibition has initiated numerous follow-up research projects, including several dissertations, supervised by the author of this article. The project has extended the Deutsches Museum’s scientific networks at a local, national and international level, and raised its profile as a world-wide hub of research on historicising and communicating the Anthropocene as a concept with multiple meanings. Moreover, the exhibition has created a museological playground to experiment with new formats of public mediation, such as graphic novels (Hamann, Leinfelder, Trischler and Wagenbreth, 2015) and public participation (Möllers, Keogh and Trischler, 2019, pp 177–9).  

In this case study you can see the integrated research museum at work. The Anthropocene exhibition was based on intensive prospective research at both the Deutsches Museum and the Rachel Carson Center. It stimulated innovative research which then generated novel forms of mediation and communication. As such, it illustrates an epistemic spiral that lifts the integrated research museum continuously to a higher level.  

Integrated research in museums: the next level

The integrated research museum interweaves the threads of research, research infrastructure and public mediation/communication into a seamless web. Hence, integration is key for the inner structure of research museums. There is much room, however, for integration at another level. Today, the world of museums is still very much fragmented into different sectors: natural history museums, art museums, museums of science and technology, history museums and cultural museums, to name but a few. At times, museums collaborate across these sectors, but rarely beyond them.  

To raise the transformative potential of museums such cross-sectoral collaborations are much needed. The current multi-fold crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, resource scarcity, unchecked economic growth, global food security, wars, and the crises of democracies represent some of the greatest challenges of our times. The transformation, exploitation and pollution of environments in the Anthropocene have pushed the Earth to, and in some cases beyond, its planetary boundaries (Rockström et al, 2023). Biological diversity is dramatically shrinking and has been, in part, irretrievably lost (Dasgupta, 2021). These human-induced changes threaten the very foundations of life for our species and countless others on this planet.  

In order to better understand the complex interactions between humans and the environment, as well as within natural and technical systems, and to generate actionable knowledge and develop solutions, new forms of inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge, alongside corresponding research infrastructures, are indispensable. Integrated exploration and research into natural objects and human-made artefacts are key: they will enable evidence-based predictions about the development of complex socio-ecological systems, which are ultimately needed to derive actionable options for the present and future.  

Object collections in museums and research institutions are unique repositories of knowledge that document the development and evolution of our world. When integrated and interconnected, they become a vital tool for analysing the diverse and complex human-environment relationships across different spatial and temporal scales. Unlocking the knowledge potential of object collections requires four interrelated pillars: a network between object collections; the generation of interdisciplinary knowledge infrastructure; a framework for inter- and transdisciplinary research; and the translation of research results into actions for politics and society. 

Sharing these goals, the Leibniz research museums have started to pool their resources and to collaborate closely on multiple levels. In two consecutive multiannual action plans they have produced numerous collaborative products such as joint exhibitions, outreach activities, visitor research programmes and scholarly conferences. A case in point at an international level are the Global Summits of Research Museums currently being organised. The first of these summits, The Transformative Potential of Research in Museums, was held at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin from 4–6 November 2018. Its main purpose was to review current imaginings, understandings and practices of collection-based research in order to explore and develop perspectives for more comprehensive and border-crossing methods and collaborations. The summit brought together the different museum sectors, each with their unique challenges and opportunities. Three topics dominated the conversations: the definition and scope of research in a museum; colonial heritage and the question of global justice; and the intertwined social and ecological crisis in the Anthropocene. 

The second global summit Objects in Motion – Museums in Motion was held at the Deutsches Museums in Munich from 2–4 October 2022. It again brought together leaders from museums around the globe and across sectors to reflect on the multiple challenges that museums face as they move through geographic, political, cultural and virtual spaces over time. The conversations focused on the particular potential, social relevance and global responsibility of collection-based research, which allows museums to move into their role as strategic places of knowledge production, social participation, and international cooperation. In essence, the Munich summit reviewed, explored and developed perspectives of mobilising the transformative power of research museums and their collections in a world in motion. 

Explore this image

With its global summits, the Leibniz research museums aim to further the integration of museums using a transnational perspective. A complementary endeavour on the national level is OSIRIS – Open Science Information and Research Infrastructure.^[10] This research consortium brings together the eight Leibniz research museums, eight additional institutions holding natural, cultural, technological and life collections, and a data competence centre. With more than 160 million physical objects and their digital data between them, the consortium represents a major share of the global natural, cultural, social and technical diversity of Germany. OSIRIS is an integrated digital library of biological, technical and cultural knowledge and includes a publicly accessible digital data platform, a virtual research environment, and thematically structured inter- and transdisciplinary laboratories. These labs generate knowledge about the development and interactions within socio-ecological systems, as well as actionable knowledge. As a research infrastructure of international significance, OSIRIS aims at harnessing the untapped potential of object collections to generate significant societal impact (Misof, Tockner and Trischler, 2024). 

The transdisciplinary labs are a crucial step to an innovative system of knowledge production and a new knowledge economy. They create a non-physical environment for participatory approaches and real-world experiments that facilitate direct collaboration between actors from science, politics, industry, art and civil society. Their focus is on the societal impact of knowledge, supporting and shaping political, economic and social transformation processes. In an open knowledge economy, promoting citizen science plays a key role in creating inclusive and participatory science. Hence, OSIRIS aims to integrate citizen science and community science as a participatory element of co-creative knowledge production. This will in turn contribute to the much-needed transition to a truly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary just and open knowledge society (Renn, 2022).  

The leading principle of OSIRIS is to provide open access to the contents of its digital research infrastructure. The latter is operated for the benefit of both the scientific community and the general public and follows the FAIR and CARE principles of data management.^[11] The consortium members ensure the long-term availability and archiving of the data and guarantee the technical quality, operation and consistency of the produced content. OSIRIS complements, expands and supports existing international infrastructures and networks. These include the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo)^[12], which aims to develop European natural science collections into an interoperable platform for data-intensive research, Europeana^[13], the online portal for Europe’s cultural heritage, and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH)^[14], to name but a few of its partner institutions at the European level. Much like the British programme Towards a National Collection^[15], OSIRIS aims at opening the national collections (of Germany) to the world and might eventually qualify for a model of European-wide integration of research structures. As a project, OSIRIS has been part of the Leibniz Roadmap of Infrastructures for two years and is currently qualifying for national funding by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for a construction phase of ten years.  

Jointly with Bernhard Misof, director-general of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change – Research Museum Alexander Koenig, the author of this article has initiated and led the OSIRIS consortium from its beginnings. He is deeply convinced that the integration of biological, technical and cultural collections in an open, just and fair knowledge economy is urgently needed to raise the societal impact of research museums in the future.