Key Concepts of Museology - ICOM

The process of musealisation does
not consist of taking an object to
place it within the physical confi nes
of the museum, as Zbyněk Stránský
explains. Through the change of
context and the process of selection
and display, the status of the object
changes. Whether it is a religious
object, a useful object or one for
enjoyment, animal or vegetable, even
something that may not be clearly
conceived as an object, once inside
the museum it becomes the material
and intangible evidence of man
and his environment and a source of
study and exhibition, thus acquiring
a specifi c cultural reality.
The recognition of this change in
nature caused Stránský, in 1970, to
propose the term musealia to identify
objects which had undergone the
process of musealisation and could
thus claim the status of museum
objects. The term was translated into
French as muséalie (see Object).
Musealisation begins with a phase
of separation (Malraux, 1951) or of
suspension (Déotte, 1986): objects
or things (real things) are separated
from their original context to be studied
as documents representing the
reality to which they formerly belonged.
A museum object is no longer
an object to be used or exchanged,
but now delivers authentic evidence
of reality. This removal (Desvallées,
1998) from reality is already an initial
form of substitution. An object separated
from the context from where
it was taken is already no more than
a substitute for the reality of which
it is supposed to be evidence. This
transfer, by the separation that has
been made from the original environment,
inevitably causes a loss of
information, which can be seen most
clearly from illegal archaeological
digs where the context of the objects
has been completely lost as they were
unearthed. It is for this reason that
musealisation, as a scientifi c process,
necessarily includes the essential
museum activities: preservation
(selection, acquisition, collection
management, conservation), research
(including cataloguing) and communication
(via exhibition, publications,
etc.) or, from another point
of view, the activities around the
selection, collection and display of
what has become musealia. At most,
the work of musealisation gives an
image which is only a substitute for
the reality from which these objects
were chosen. This complex substitute,
or model of reality (built within
the museum) comprises museality,
that is to say a specifi c value which
documents reality, but is in no way
reality itself.
Musealisation goes beyond the
logic of collections alone and is part
of the tradition founded on rational
processes developed with the invention
of modern sciences. The object
carrying the information or the
document-object, once musealised,
is incorporated into the core of the
museum’s scientifi c activity just as
this has developed since the Renaissance.
The purpose of this activity is
to explore reality by means of sen-
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