Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management

centres and museums will be keenly competitive, not only with other forms of entertainment, but with each other. This is the sense that Bacon intended in warning, thirdly, against the idols of the marketplace - represented by the doctrines of commercial sponsorship and expedient government advertisement. The fact of sponsorship in museums is not new. Bell Telephone and Swift Foods at the Chicago Museum of Science, British Nuclear Fuels at the Science Museum in London, the American Chemical Society at the Smithsonian - how invasive the corporate tag has become. All museums seem on the way to becoming "Museums Incorporated". About the effects of sponsorship on attitudes towards science and technology there are many views, and much experience. The effects of sponsorship on public programs remains a matter of debate, particularly where sponsorship is paying for new exhibition expenditure. What are the appropriate responsibilities and obligations of clients and customers, where telecommunications exhibitions are funded by large corporations - or nor at all - and where computer-aided design comes by aid of IBM or Wang - or not at all? And how does sponsorship affect a museum's willingness or ability to deal with controversy? Can an exhibition on mineral resources, sponsored by a mining company, or on nuclear power, by a government nuclear agency, ever be "objective"? In reassessing these idols, science museums face some of their most important challenges. For EAAST, the mediation of objects, logics, and frames of museum meanings, affrods the historian of science and sociologist of knowledge an important research site, away from more conventional foci in the laboratory, the field, and the classroom. "The scientific laboratory of a scientific man is his place of works", said Lord Kelvin, and it was to "internalise" nature, that natural philosophy set out to achieve. "The naturalist and the botanist go to foreign lands, to study the wonders of nature, and describe and classify the results of their observations. But they must do more than merely describe, represent, and depict what they have seen. They must bring home the products of their expeditions to their studies, and have recourse to the appliances of the laboratory properly so-called for their thorough and detailed examination."

26 But the museum forms a continuum with the laboratory - empirically and in terms of critical theory. If the purpose of the laboratory is to measure an experiment, it is the function of the museum to justify and explain. In problematising the museum as a research site, we must take care not to lose sight of three essential messages: 1. Museum objects, so classified - whether beam engines, or armillary spheres - have individual and collective biographies. The biography of each