Key Concepts of Museology - ICOM

institutional nature of the collection,
and on the other hand, the material
or intangible nature of the collection
media.
1. Frequent attempts have been
made to differentiate between a
museum collection and other types of
collection because the term ‘collection’
is so commonly used. Generally
speaking (since this is not the case
for every museum) the museum
collection – or the museum collections
– are both the source and
the purpose of the activities of the
museum perceived as an institution.
Collections can thus be defi ned as
“the collected objects of a museum,
acquired and preserved because of
their potential value as examples, as
reference material, or as objects of
aesthetic or educational importance”
(Burcaw, 1997). We can thus refer
to the museum phenomenon as the
institutionalisation of a private collection.
We must note, however, that
if the curator or the museum staff
are not collectors, collectors have
always had close ties with curators.
Museums should have an acquisition
policy – as emphasised by ICOM,
which also mentions a collection
policy – museums select, purchase,
assemble, receive. The French verb
collectionner is rarely used because it
is too closely linked to the actions of
the private collector and to its derivatives
(Baudrillard, 1968), that is to
say collectionism and accumulation,
known pejoratively as ‘collectionitis’.
From this perspective the collection
is seen as both the result and the
source of a scientifi c programme,
the purpose of which is acquisition
and research, beginning with the
material and the intangible evidence
of man and his environment. This
criterion, however, does not differentiate
between the museum and
the private collection, in so far as
the latter can be assembled with a
scientifi c objective, even though the
museum may acquire a private collection
which has been built with
very little intention to serve science.
This is when the institutional nature
of the museum dominates when
defi ning the term. According to Jean
Davallon, in a museum “the objects
are always parts of systems and categories”
(Davallon, 1992). Among
the systems relating to a collection,
besides the written inventory which
is a basic requirement of a museum
collection, it is just as essential to
adopt a classifi cation system which
describes and can also rapidly fi nd
any item among the thousands or
millions of objects (taxonomy, for
example, is the science of classifying
living organisms). Modern classifi
cation systems have been greatly
infl uenced by information technology,
but documenting collections
remains an activity requiring specifi
c and rigorous knowledge, based
on building up a thesaurus of terms
describing the relations between the
different categories of objects.
2. The defi nition of collection can
also be viewed from a more general
perspective to include private collectors
and museums, but taking
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