| Popis: |
This article is on museum studies, not on museums. Museum studies is defined as the interdisciplinary engagement in critical examination of the history, functions, and roles of museums in society. Although the name museum studies began to be used in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an older term, museology, is more commonly used in non-English speaking countries and is a more appropriate and descriptive term for the field, despite the widespread use of museum studies. In this article, museology and museum studies are used synonymously. When Jay Rounds set out, nearly in the 1990s, to empirically determine whether museum studies had a core body of literature, he did so among skeptics who claimed the field was underdeveloped and lacked a foundation of knowledge. The results of Rounds’s analysis contradicted these assertions and revealed a substantial core literature and a significant body of discipline-specific knowledge. Over the last two decades, the museological knowledge base and quantity of core literature continued to grow exponentially. Museum studies has a robust foundation and a diverse, healthy, growing body of core literature. Since their origin in the late 1700s, modern museums have evolved and diversified extensively, but the museum profession did not emerge as a distinct field of endeavor until the early 1900s. Nevertheless, the earliest museological publications date back to the precursors of modern museums in the mid-1500s. Far and away most of the bibliographic growth in museum studies has occurred in the last three decades, resulting in a historically sparse, but contemporaneously rich, museological literature. |
