The Changing Purposes for Our Museums: A Review Article on K. Message's Recent Book

Abstract

Over the last ten years or so, Dr Kylie Message has been conducting highly significant perspective research into museums and museum spaces, particularly focusing on those which may be deemed 'antecedent' to our mindsets, and/or located in greater propinquity to Australian/Australasian readers. This work proceeds in the chronological sense by recording both the purposes of the great European museum collections in the nineteenth century and also the exciting fashion in which museums around the world have been reinventing themselves more recently, refusing to confine their purposes to presenting scholarly cultural archives. For once, most have seen their true raison d'être as their needing to reach out to a broader public, to dialogue much relevantly with the full range of their (potential) communities.