Museum

A museum is an institution that collects, conserves, researches and publicly exhibits objects and specimens of artistic, historical, cultural or scientific significance, serving simultaneously as a repository of preserved material culture and as an institution of public education and interpretation. The term derives from the Greek mouseion, a temple or shrine dedicated to the Muses, and the most celebrated ancient institution bearing the name, the Musaeum of Alexandria, founded in Egypt in the early third century BC under the Ptolemaic dynasty, functioned as a major center of scholarship attached to the Library of Alexandria rather than as a public exhibition space in the modern sense. The modern public museum developed substantially in Europe from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, building on earlier private cabinets of curiosities assembled by wealthy collectors, with the British Museum, established in London in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759, and the Louvre in Paris, opened as a public museum in 1793 following the French Revolution's transfer of former royal collections to national ownership, among the most influential early examples of the transition from private collection to institution of broad public access. Museums today encompass a wide range of specialized forms, including art museums, natural history museums, science museums and history museums, and the international museum professional body ICOM, the International Council of Museums, maintains a formal working definition of the museum as a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society, open to the public, that acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits humanity's tangible and intangible heritage.