Are Museums Outdated?
According to 24 Hour Museum News 15,462 people visited the Coal Mining Museum for England in August 2004. Between April and August of the same year, 2,118,518 visitors passed through the turnstiles of the British Museum.
While these statistics are almost as old as some of the exhibits, one wonders why so many people go to visit museums. I mean, in this day and age, everything you want to know about any subject - including History - can be found on the internet. If you want to know about Christopher Columbus, go to www.columbusnavigation.com If you want to know about Australian explorers, Burke and Wills, go here:www.burkeandwills.net.au If you want to learn about Herod, Wikipedia will help you out.
Do you think that you will learn something extra by being in the same room as a wax replica of an original reconstruction of an ancient tool, based on either fragments of iron and crustacean fossils or some book-worm-historian's educated (best) guess of what life was like way back when?
Do you think that by going to a museum and standing face to face with inanimate objects labeled with glossy tags and well-written explanations on embossed card will give you more information than a Google search of millions of articles, worldwide?
Are the closing times, noise-police, do-not-touch signs, overpriced gift shops and crowds of people worth the mortgage-your-house-to-get-in entrance fee?
So why did 331,605 people visit the Kyoto National Museum in 2005 or an unpublished number of people visited the Frank and Jane Clement Brick Museum in any given year?
The answer is simple. People like to collect things, and the museum is the one place that people can go to see what the government, organizations or private individuals have spent their time accumulating: dinosaurs, machinery or, surfing memorabilia.
We are pack-rats by nature. And we like to hold on to things for so long that others will pay good money to come and see that well-presented pile of stuff. Pictures on the internet don't (yet) give you the full sense of how much stuff of one kind can be displayed in a building. But walk up those steps, through the rotating door and into a museum, the reality of what your tax-dollars have been spent collecting over the past thousand years really hits home.
So next time you find yourself sitting at your computer taking the virtual tour of The Museum of HP Calculators, stop and consider for a moment whether you are really treating yourself to the full experience. Get in your car, hop on a bus, take a train, tram or bicycle (or some ancient method of transport from, say, the era of the Empire of the Great Qing) and get over to your local museum. They've spent millenia collecting things, you may as well go and see them.
This blog post was written in response to a challenge to write about why people visit museums.
While these statistics are almost as old as some of the exhibits, one wonders why so many people go to visit museums. I mean, in this day and age, everything you want to know about any subject - including History - can be found on the internet. If you want to know about Christopher Columbus, go to www.columbusnavigation.com If you want to know about Australian explorers, Burke and Wills, go here:www.burkeandwills.net.au If you want to learn about Herod, Wikipedia will help you out.
Do you think that you will learn something extra by being in the same room as a wax replica of an original reconstruction of an ancient tool, based on either fragments of iron and crustacean fossils or some book-worm-historian's educated (best) guess of what life was like way back when?
Do you think that by going to a museum and standing face to face with inanimate objects labeled with glossy tags and well-written explanations on embossed card will give you more information than a Google search of millions of articles, worldwide?
Are the closing times, noise-police, do-not-touch signs, overpriced gift shops and crowds of people worth the mortgage-your-house-to-get-in entrance fee?
So why did 331,605 people visit the Kyoto National Museum in 2005 or an unpublished number of people visited the Frank and Jane Clement Brick Museum in any given year?
The answer is simple. People like to collect things, and the museum is the one place that people can go to see what the government, organizations or private individuals have spent their time accumulating: dinosaurs, machinery or, surfing memorabilia.
We are pack-rats by nature. And we like to hold on to things for so long that others will pay good money to come and see that well-presented pile of stuff. Pictures on the internet don't (yet) give you the full sense of how much stuff of one kind can be displayed in a building. But walk up those steps, through the rotating door and into a museum, the reality of what your tax-dollars have been spent collecting over the past thousand years really hits home.
So next time you find yourself sitting at your computer taking the virtual tour of The Museum of HP Calculators, stop and consider for a moment whether you are really treating yourself to the full experience. Get in your car, hop on a bus, take a train, tram or bicycle (or some ancient method of transport from, say, the era of the Empire of the Great Qing) and get over to your local museum. They've spent millenia collecting things, you may as well go and see them.
This blog post was written in response to a challenge to write about why people visit museums.
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