%0 Journal Article
%T Museums theme – Adventures in Museology: category building over a century, and the context for experiments in reinvigorating the Science Museum at the turn of the twenty-first century
%A Robert Bud
%D 2018
%V 
%N Autumn 2017
%K Artefacts
%K introduction
%K museology
%K museums theme
%X 
%Z For the Science Museum’s online presence see ‘British Museums most googled in the world’; for the standing of the National Air and Space Museum see ‘Global Attractions Attendance Report’, 2016.

%Z The group of papers presented here came out of the 2011 Artefacts XVI conference at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden, which addressed the theme of ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’. Other papers from that conference are published in the accompanying Artefacts publication Challenging Collections: Approaches to the Heritage of Recent Science and Technology, Boyle, A and Hagmann, J-G (eds), Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017.

%Z See ‘Focus: why science museums matter: history of science museums between Academics and Audiences’, 2017

%Z This analysis is broadly comparable with the more general approach of Butler, 1992. Her approach is, however, more nationally based, and is less concerned with the international circulation of ideas about museums.

%Z See, for instance, ‘The French Museum of Physical and Mechanical Science’, 1874

%Z Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science, 1874, Fourth report (C.884), 14

%Z See Bud, R, 2009

%Z ‘Report of the Committee on the Science Collections of the South Kensington Museum’, 28 October 1881, ED 24/47, National Archives, UK

%Z Mumford drew his use of the word ‘Technics’ from his mentor Patrick Geddes, who drew on the German word Technik. Here it refers to the practice of making rather than its study, captured by the word ‘technology’, though later usage has combined the two, in English at least.

%Z Artefacts Consortium. Museum Directory, consulted July 2017. Artefacts is a consortium of scholars from museums and academe, established in 1996, in order to promote the use of objects in serious historical study.

%Z This crisis of confidence is explored in Grandin, Wormbs and Widmalm, 2004.

%Z Although the perceived promotion of ‘heritage’ by the private museums was deeply controversial. See, for instance, West, 1988; but also see Samuel, 1994. On the period, see Lowenthal, 1985.

%Z Cossons, 2000

%Z At the Royal Society of Arts conference, Cossons argued “Conservators, designers, educational and interpretive staff, administrators and managers have radically altered the population pattern. No longer do curators hold a majority of the sweat equity in our great museums” (Cossons 1991, 185).

%Z The experience of the Science Museum is described by Boon, 2012.

%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/adventures-in-museology/
%J Science Museum Group Journal