A museum’s prime responsibility must be to maintain its collections and to do everything possible to delay the natural laws of deterioration. The acquisition of an item almost certainly brings it into a new and potentially alien environment. Material that has been recovered from the ground through archaeological excavation may need immediate treatment to stabilize it. Many of the materials from which objects are made are inherently unstable and undergo chemical or structural change as they age. A new or shifting environment can accelerate these changes, and temperature, light, humidity, and human and other biological factors all need to be controlled. In addition, conservation involves the treatment and, where feasible and acceptable, the restoration of objects as nearly as possible to their former condition.

Most large museums have their own laboratories where preservation and restoration work is carried out, and some take on projects for other museums as well. In some cases, as at the British Museum, a separate department of scientific research supports the museum’s academic and conservation work, providing advanced scientific equipment for the analysis, dating, and identification of materials. Some museums are served by independent conservation laboratories, an example of which is the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, which uses a fleet of mobile laboratories to attend to museum collections in many parts of the country.

Documentation

Documentation is a significant function of any museum, whether it holds only a few hundred objects or many millions of items. Quite apart from the need for records to maintain adequate control of its collections, a museum’s documentation system provides an indispensable record of the information associated with the objects for research. The documentation system also may include records to facilitate the museum’s interpretative and other work.

The form of a museum’s documentation system may vary considerably, but to meet these requirements it should provide the fullest possible information about each item and its history. There are no generally accepted classification schemes for museum objects, although certain subjects have developed schemes with numeric or alphanumeric notations to facilitate the ordering and retrieval of information. For the natural sciences, taxonomic names are normally used.

A number of museums have developed computerized documentation systems, some online but others relying on machine-generated indexes, periodically updated, to meet most of their information requirements. The advantages of computerized documentation have been exploited in a number of ways—for instance, in exchanging data between museums to facilitate study and research or in making collection information available for public use in the museum gallery or over the Internet.

Research

Because they hold the primary material evidence for a number of subjects concerned with an understanding of humankind and the environment, museums clearly have an important role in research. A museum’s research program is related to its objectives as an institution. A program may be concerned directly with the public services provided, in preparing exhibitions, catalogs, and other publications, or with promoting a better understanding of the discipline or region that it serves. In large museums, and in university museums in particular, pure and applied research may be of national or international significance and may be associated with fieldwork or study visits. Active research and publication on a given topic, apart from contributing to the academic standing of the institution, may attract further collections relevant to the topic.

Many museums provide facilities, apart from those used by casual visitors, for researchers to study collections and associated documentation. Such facilities may include study rooms with a supporting library and equipment to assist in the examination of collections. Certain museums have accommodations for visiting foreign scholars; this feature is particularly helpful at site museums that are difficult to reach.

Exhibition

Many museums have abandoned the traditional view of exhibition, by which storage and display are ends in themselves, in favour of an approach that enhances the setting of the object or collection. To this end museums use the expertise of a number of specialists—designers, educators, sociologists, and interpreters as well as curators—to improve communication through objects. The result has been a remarkable transformation in the presentation of museum displays. Far greater use is made of colour and light (within the bounds prescribed by conservation requirements), in the way material is interpreted through a variety of mediums (sound, video, interaction between visitor and exhibit, virtual reality, as well as more traditional methods), and in the provision of a more relaxing environment in which to enjoy the exhibits. A result of museums’ increased awareness of the needs of their visitors has been a considerable increase in museum attendance.

As the museum’s cultural role has developed, so its exhibition work has diversified. Large international exhibitions have been organized by cooperating nations and have been shown in the major museums of the participating countries. Exhibitions organized for national circulation are also increasingly common. Museums concerned with a particular region have arranged topical exhibitions to tour the area, and, in places without suitable premises for display or in sparsely populated areas, exhibitions have toured in specially adapted buses or trains. Some countries have developed multipurpose cultural centres, and collaboration with museums has resulted in exhibition programs successfully reaching a wide audience.

Interest in the historic and natural environment globally has involved museums in the preservation and interpretation of sites, monuments, and landscapes (as in the Slave House museum at Gorée Island, Senegal). Here the conflict inherent in imposing an interpretive medium into a natural or historical context has to be resolved. In its simplest form, interpretation may be conveyed through nature or history trails in which information is provided in written or recorded form. With a historic property there are also opportunities to reenact events associated with the property, such as period battle scenes and banquets, to demonstrate industrial or craft techniques, or to use theatre and son et lumière performances to interpret the site.