Research

Community Museums Past and Present

This research focuses on the development of community museums, meaning places where the heritage of a collectively experienced past is conserved by and for a group of people who identify with that past, from which they derive inspiration and identity. The past few decades an increasing awareness has grown concerning the relationship between heritage, communities and museums. The emphasis on the concept of community in the museum sector raises a lot of questions concerning access, participation and representation. Heritage museums in the Netherlands –like everywhere in the western world- are struggling to redefine their position within society, rethinking their basic functions and finding new ways to reach out to their communities.

On the one hand, this project wants to focus on the birth and development of heritage activities related to social empowerment of communities, especially from the sixties and seventies onwards, in order to grasp the recent developments concerning community museums today.   

On the other hand, this project looks at what actions are currently undertaken by the museum sector to represent, reach and bind the communities at which history museums aim and/or in which they are embedded and strives to provide an overview of these actions. The final goal is to construct a theoretical basis of museum-community relations within the framework of current developments in culture, media and leisure.

After the first phase of this research it appears that in many present-day researches a limited and traditional notion of ‘community’ is employed. Another early conclusion is that the introduction of the concept of community in museum discourse has a significant impact on the museum profession and the nature of everyday museum activities such as collecting, display and the way that museums view the public.