Introduction
Museums are public institutions. The American Association of Museums Code of Ethics states that “for museums, public service is paramount.” But there is continuing and useful debate about how public service, indeed how the public, should be defined and what the public might require, demand, or need. What is the appropriate role for the public in the work of museums? How might museums balance the needs of the general and specific publics? And how should museums balance their responsibility to the immediate needs of the public today and those of future publics?
Museums have long been public institutions, but the nature of their interaction with the public has changed. Victorian museums often aimed at “edifying” the masses. In the early twentieth century, many museums saw their role as providing training for citizenship. Exposure to the best that civilization had to offer, the thought went, would improve museum visitors, making them better people and better citizens.
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Dana, J.C. 1917. The new museum. Woodstock (VT): The Elm Tree Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 2012. From ethnology to heritage: the role of the museum, in B. Messias Carbonell (ed.) Museum studies: an anthology of contexts. 2nd ed. London: Blackwell.
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Lubar, S. (2014). Heritage Museums and the Public. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1203
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1203
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-0426-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-0465-2
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