ISS 25 (1995).pdf - The International Council of Museums

) What is a museum?
That is a recurrent question within our Committee on Museology. We may
consider "museum" as a permanent institution, as most museum professionals in the world still
do. Coming from the latin institutione, it means a thing that has been created , instituted ,
established, socially recognized as such. To institutions we attribute the character of relative
permanence - and their are usually identifyed by the values of their codes of action, some of
them expressed as laws. Being a permanent institution, the museum would be an established
thing , continually existing within the system of values of a society, and having specific codes.
Under this concept, "training for museum awareness" means qualifying somebody to work in a
specific type of institution - thus training being based on information about specific skills to
administer, document, retrieve, preserve, exhibit, garantee security, survey the audience,
etc., etc. It may also mean giving a background about the conceptual frames into which the
museum develops its action. (This is more or less what museum training programs used to do up
to 20 years ago).
But the abovementioned experiences with community action have brought about
the relativization of the museum concept. A holistic approach has made possible the creation of
concepts such as the total museum (musee integral), the ecomuseum , the inner museum , the
museum of the biosphere. Development of technology and of Semiotics has given way to
concepts such as the virtual museum. With so many facets of the concept, it became difficult to
understand the museum as institution, now that it has incorporated the capacity to change. In
the present days, it is already accepted that the concept of Museum varies according to the
different world visions of societies, in time and in space.
So today, when we talk about training for museum awareness we usually refer to
the analytic study of such concepts, to the investigation of museum as phenomenon or to the
idea of Museum, which lead to the understanding of Museology either as philosophy or as a
scientific discipline.
c) What is a community?
That's another complicated question. When talking about ·communities· we
usually take for granted that community is a group of people, either sharing the same tenritory or
the same cultural identity or some other combination of cultural and/or social characters that
make them identifiable as a group. We seldom remember that plants and animals form
biological communities, or that biology refers to communities of microbes as well. We usually
forget the nuclear family as a basic community, or the population of the world as planet Earth
community, to which UNESCO and ICOM so frequently refer.
Since this is not a meeting on terminology, let us consider ·community· in its basic social
sense: a group of people sharing common traits and pattems of behavior.
Also for purposes of study, let us substitute the word "training· for individual or group
education and qualification.
Now we come back to training and offer you a second issue to reflection:
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