Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

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

1. A science museum best serves the public when the public can take issue with its objects. "Speakers Corners", "Rapid response galleries", "Actualités", such as at La Villette - these all help to show how knowledge grows. In the process, the practices of science become more transparent. They remove the limits that bind tacit understandings to elites above recall, and make them a lingua franca for an educated citizenry. 2. Science museums are at their best when they foster links with working lives, and those lives should be integrated into the ways museums are organised, arranged, and sold. For example, museums have become visual reference libraries - with sources are all the more accessible for not being bound by the printed word. Museums may provoke and quicken an interest in the applications of science, but unless there are links with home, the classroom, and the workplace, much of the inspiration will disappear. 3. Science museums must rise above the celebration of national origins and achievements. This is difficult, as nationalism is deeply inscribed in the history of science. The Smithsonian locates its physical science and technology in the National Museum of American History. Is not the National Museum for Science and Technology the British Museum for Science and Technology, by another name? But having paid our patriotic dues, surely we must go beyond the narrownesses of national and Western culture, and encourage different understandings of nature and uses of knowledge, with all the hybrids and ambivlances these may contain? Presenting the artifacts of oriental and Aboriginal knowledge, for example, teaches us much about the ways in which the discourses of colonialism and of culture react upon the intellectual traditions we associate with the metropolis. 4. Finally, there must be more scholarship that takes the museum as a research site. For in the museum, the public understanding of science confronts the public processes of science by which people find and record information, decode phenomena, and read objects that, in fact, do not speak for themselves. In the museum, biography and logic show how objects generate knowledge. Conceiving itself as a process, as well as a place, the museum can find a new identity, one not isolated from the world of competing pressures, but deeply involved in understanding and transforming our relationships with reality.