American Claimants

This chapter examines descriptions of the British Museum in travel narratives and diaries by American travelers to show how it informed broader conversations about the development of American museums. Visiting during the mid-nineteenth century, American tourists encountered a museum that was attempting to organize its collections and define its purpose as a public museum, and their descriptions highlight the anxieties raised by this process. Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented the museum’s vast quantities of objects, linking a fruitless search for meaningful artifacts to questions of genealogy. Other American travelers more explicitly considered the role of visitors in interpreting collections. The artist Orra White Hitchcock reflected on the place of women in the museum’s galleries, while the Black abolitionist William Wells Brown celebrated the opportunity to continue his education and to participate in critical discussions of the museum.

Novel Inventions

Chapter 4 examines the distinctive history of the U.S. Patent Office gallery, which combined national repository, bureaucratic office, and public museum. Its collections included the models submitted by inventors with their patent applications, which offered tangible examples of new legal standards for novelty and utility. Tourists marveled at the model machines on display, connecting them to ideals of national progress and ingenuity, and the gallery’s collections sparked wider discussions of the relationship between nation, invention, and spectacle. Ralph Waldo Emerson drew on an imagined collection of machines to contemplate the relationship between technological novelty and literary originality, while Walt Whitman’s description of the gallery as a temporary Civil War hospital examined the social and human implications of such a strange spectacle. These accounts highlight broader debates about the place of new ideas in a national museum and how such contributions would be defined.

Stakeholder Salience Model in the Practices of Public Museum Management

Stakeholder theory is extensively explored. On the one hand, previously pointed issues are deepened and reconsidered; on the second, new research contexts emerge. When it comes to museums, due to the changing environmental situation, they have to modify their way of functioning by combining tradi-tional museum duties with managerial perspective and necessity to be effective. Although discussions about museum management include stakeholders, yet such exploration is quite general. Hence, the aim of this article is to look at the stakeholder salience model in the context of the specificity and the prac-tice of public museums' functioning. Through qualitative research with in-depth interviews, content analysis, and observations, stakeholder attributes were specified, with reference to connected activities and associated entities. The findings present what attributes are characteristics of a particular stake-holders' group, including how their diversity and overlapping look like. Moreover, findings showed that perceived stakeholder salience depends on the particular project and that not always salient stakehold-ers have been identified with all three attributes. Although stakeholders are noticed as a crucial element for the effective museums' functioning, their analysis remains at the general level. Hence, by taking one of the theoretical perspectives for the analysis, the study aims to fill in the existing gap. It is also impor-tant to consider the challenges standing in front of the museums, including the difficult situations that arise from the pandemic restrictions. Although in practice it is hard to omit the unpredictability, the recognition of stakeholders' characteristics might minimize the risk and uncertainty, even if a new stakeholder is not considered.

Local lore expeditions of the Pavlodar House of Geography in 2021

Preservation of historical memory and materials representing the historical and cultural heritage of small settlements is an important task of state museum institutions. Along with this, in the Pavlodar region of the Republic of Kazakhstan, members of the public association “Pavlodar House of Geography” are engaged in such work. During summer expedition trips to the villages of the region, they collected significant audio-video materials on the history of families, labor collectives, and settlements. The exhibits were received that replenished the funds of the public museum of the Pavlodar House of Geography.

The history of the Memorial Museum Perm–36: the experience of historiographical comprehension and museumification

The article studies the history of a small timber-harvesting colony that was created in the times of the GULAG labor camps, outlived the period of being a political colony, and was transformed into a museum, the Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm–36, in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of publications of the 1990s–2000s, an attempt was made to recreate the history of comprehension of the era of political repression using the example of a certain museum. From the active study of the topic in the early 1990s and establishment of a public museum with support from the Perm Oblast administration, Perm–36 moved on to undergo severe criticism from the local and federal press, deprivation of financing and administrative support and, finally, rather rough dismissal of the museum administration and appointment of top managers from the Ministry of Culture. The public museum had a powerful creative and scientific potential that allowed it to develop, implement new forms of work, and attract the international museum and human rights community, but, unfortunately, the State Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm–36 has become an ordinary regional museum in fact. In the first years of being a state museum (2015–16), the administration of Perm-36 tried to revise the directions of work of the public museum. This was expressed in its attempts to justify the authorities and the cruel laws of the time when the colony existed and to find some incriminating evidence against its political prisoners. New exhibitions of the museum (e.g. “Broken by windfalls”) highlighted the state’s need for the prisoners’ work, in particular in harvesting timber needed for the reconstruction of war-ravaged cities, the successes in mechanization of camp production, and so on. The public outcry forced the leadership of the museum to adjust its course. Now, according to the development concept adopted in 2019, the activities of the reserve museum are aimed at preserving the memory of victims of political repression in order to prevent such tragedies in the future. The state museum Perm–36 continues to open new exhibitions and expositions that tell the story of the colony through the stories of people from the GULAG camps, dissidents, and human rights activists. However, the activities of the state memorial museum, which is deprived of public initiative and creative potential of the first directors, cannot yet rise to the level of international recognition and significance that its predecessor, the public museum, used to have.

Social and Historical Aspects of Formation and Functioning

The article examines the milestones of formation and development of the first public museum of Azerbaijan - the National Museum of the History of Azerbaijan. The author tracks the changing profile of the museum in the 20-30s of the last century within the context of changes of state policy and ideological priorities in Azerbaijan. The article also provides information on the role of the museum in the emergence and development of archaeological research in Azerbaijan, on the main achievements of the museum in the field of preserving and studying the historical and cultural heritage of the Azerbaijani people.

The Misrepresentation of Hong Kongness

Established in 1962, the Hong Kong Museum of Art was the first public museum in the city. It closed in August 2015 for a four-year renovation and spatial expansion of the facility, and reopened its doors in November 2019. The renovation happened precisely in the interstices of two important historical ruptures in recent Hong Kong history: the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the ongoing Anti-China Extradition Movement that started in 2019. These movements are redefining the identity of the city and its people in contrast to the conventional Hong Kong cliché of transformation from fishing village to modern financial hub. Without addressing recent changes in cultural identity, the revamped museum rhetorically deploys obsolete curatorial narratives through exhibitions of Hong Kong art. This report critiques the representation of Hong Kongness in the revamped museum and argues that the latter is a soulless entity that overlooks the fact that both politics and art are now reconstructing local identities.

Legislative regulation of museums activity in the Second Rzechpospolita Polska

The article considers the creation of the legislative basis regarding the museums’ activity in interwar (1918-1939) Poland. Temporary organization of common government authorities in 1918 suggested subordination of museums of interwar Poland to the Ministry of religion andpopular education. It also describes changes in subordination of the museums and some features of law-making process. In April 1918, the Department of Art of the Ministry processed and offered the first project of temporary law on museums. According to the legislative proposal, state politics in the museum industry had to be implementedusing the special museum abstract within Department of Art. In the draft, there were a few types of museum identified: the main ones (national) and regional, educational and special. It was necessary to legislate on determining andidentifying main directions of the activity, to organizationally form the framework of their functioning, for the sake of museum professional work activization, controlling their activity, help with creation of new collections and support of some old ones. It is stated that his fact was understood by the representatives of the organizations that were either connected to museum industry or played a catalytic role in museum reforms in the interwar period, for instance, The Union of Museums of Poland.It was the Union that the draft law “Onthe trusteeship for the public museums” was prepared by. Apart from the draft law, the project of the implementing regulation to the bill regarding establishment and activity of the Museum State Council was adopted. In the article, the process of establishing the draft law is considered. The article reflects the representation of modified law “On the trusteeship for the public museums” in the Parliament of Second Rzechpospolita Polska. In the parliament, the draft bill was considered as a framework, which determines the concept of a public museum. According to the bill, Minister of religion and education implemented the trusteeship and control of the activity of the public museums and approved theirstatutes. The articlealso reviews the aims and tasks of the adopted law and further implementing regulations, particularly, on the establishment of Museum State Council.