University museum

A university museum is a repository of collections run by a university, typically founded to aid teaching and research within the institution of higher learning. The Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford in England is an early example, originally housed in the building that is now the Museum of the History of Science. A more recent example is the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, originally constructed as a hotel in 1796 it is now the official museum of the University of Bath.

Historically, the focus of university museums and galleries included curatorial research into, as well as the display of, commemorative, ceremonial, decorative and didactic collections. For academics, these collections served as a valuable research resource. For students, museums performed both a leisure and learning function, developing their visual literacy, critical thinking, and creative skills. Aside from campus, museums served their perspective city and town's communities, spreading museological literacy among the different target audiences.

With decades, the role of the university museums changed as they started to become more open and receptive to the cultural needs of the public. Public educational outreach is considered now by many university museums as an integral part of their mission, some even adopt a market approach. Changes and decentralization of the institutional values coinciding with budgeting shortfalls in some cases "gave rise to tensions and a lack of cohesive identity among a demoralized staff". Many campus museums "have critical needs for facilities, staff, and support". In the 21st century, despite the challenges brought by transition, the university museums not only continue to play important role in object-based learning (tradition that reaches beyond the record of the founding of the University of Bologna) but also perform important civic and cultural functions for the larger society.

Organizationally, university museums are represented by a variety of historical, traditional and novel entities, such as anatomical theaters and archeology museums, natural science and art museums, history museums, planetariums, arboretums and aquariums, archives and house-museums, science and arts centers, ecomuseums, hospital museums, and contemporary art galleries, as well as discipline-specific collections hosted by academic departments and institutes; some special collections are hosted by the university libraries. In general, university museums and collections are classified based on disciplinary criteria or the nature of the artifacts. In Europe the number of the university museums and collections is estimated as 12,914.

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