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| September 2009 |
| Billie Silvey |
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| Types of Exhibits |
| Museums collect and preserve artifacts of historical, scientific or artistic value and exhibit them to the public. Both children and adults can learn from them or just enjoy looking at them. Most feature continuing and special exhibits.
In the past, museum guards, signs and glass cases enforced strict “Do Not Touch” rules. That’s still the case if the object is delicate or old or valuable, but more and more museums offer interactive exhibits which engage visitors, making them participants and not just viewers. |
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| Museums display collections of artifacts, like these carved wooden carousel animals. |
| Dioramas are among my favorite types of museum exhibits. The three-dimensional, full-size replicas or scale models of landscapes can make historical and natural environments come alive. Scale model dioramas take us back in time by showing historical scenes, like the scene above of World War II Berlin or the one below of Tokyo in the Edo period. |
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| Full-size models carry us to parts of the world we may not have visited, as in the model of seabirds from the natural history museum in Milan. Taxidermy in natural poses is combined with reconstructed settings, which fade into realistically painted backdrops. |
| Types of museums include the following:
Archeological museums exhibit the findings of archeological digs—the artifacts of daily life in the past. Art museums feature the works of specific artists or eras, or works illustrating the entire history of art. Maritime museums and war museums trace developments in naval history and shipbuilding and in the development of ways to wage war. Natural history museums specialize in the natural world, with skeletons or reconstructions of animals from the past, exhibits of the various types of individual animals living today, and environments and the animals that live in them. Open air museums are reconstructions of buildings, or even entire communities from the past, showing how people lived their daily lives and made and used the objects of their technology. Page Museum at La Brea Tarpits combines open air and closed museum exhibits. Currently Project 23 allows visitors to observe paleontologists as they extract skeletons of prehistoric animals from slabs of asphalt dug up in a construction site. Specialized museums display artifacts of such diverse subjects as music, beads, toys, and sports. In addition to exhibits, museums also offer lectures, films, performances or demonstrations. Virtual exhibits—and even entire museums—exist through recorded sound and images on the web. |
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| Science museums stimulate science learning. The California Science Center is the West Coast's largest hands-on science museum, featuring everything from space to technology to human anatomy to ecology (see interior and exterior views at right and below. Phase I of reconstruction is complete. Phase II will include the World of Ecology). |