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Museum & Heritage Studies · Encyclopedia

Museum and heritage studies as an applied-and-academic humanities discipline at human-root level covers the structured training of museum curators, collections managers, conservators, museum educators, exhibition designers, heritage-and-historic-site managers, and the broader cultural-heritage workforce. The discipline operates principally through dedicated museum-studies programs at universities (the MA Museum Studies as the principal entry-tier credential globally), with conservation-specific training requiring additional specialised graduate study at conservation programs (the apex programs at Winterthur/UD, NYU Conservation Center, Buffalo State, UCLA/Getty, plus the Italian and UK conservation-programs at the Courtauld and the Victoria & Albert / RCA conservation programs).\n\nThe global museum-and-heritage institutional landscape includes major universities and the substantial museum-and-heritage-organisation employment base. Museum-studies programs: the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies (consistently top-ranked globally for museum studies), the UCL Institute of Archaeology Museum Studies, the Cambridge MPhil Heritage Studies, the Winterthur/UD Program in American Material Culture, the GW Museum Studies, the John Cabot University Museum Studies Program, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences Centre for Heritage Studies. The major museum employers globally: the British Museum (8 million annual visitors pre-pandemic), the Louvre (10 million pre-pandemic), the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York (7 million pre-pandemic), the Vatican Museums, the State Hermitage Museum St Petersburg, the National Museum of China, the Smithsonian Institution's 19+ museums and research centres, the Tate group London, the V&A London, MoMA New York, the Getty Center and Getty Villa Los Angeles, plus the broader 55,000+ museums globally per ICOM's World Museum Database.\n\nIndia's museum-and-heritage infrastructure has structural depth through the central-government museum sector. The National Museum New Delhi, the Indian Museum Calcutta (founded 1814, Asia's oldest museum), the Salar Jung Museum Hyderabad, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Mumbai (formerly Prince of Wales Museum), the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Delhi, the National Gallery of Modern Art with its Delhi-Mumbai-Bengaluru branches, the Bharat Kala Bhavan at BHU, the substantial Archaeological Survey of India site-museums network across India's 3,700+ centrally-protected monuments. The Ministry of Culture's recent initiatives: the National Mission on Cultural Mapping (2017+), the Project Mausam (Indian Ocean cultural-heritage initiative), the substantial post-2014 expansion of historic-monument tourism infrastructure under the Adopt-a-Heritage Apni Dharohar Apni Pehchaan scheme. The Indian-private-museum sector has expanded through the post-2010 major-collector-private-museum trend (Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the JSW-funded museum work, the Museum of Solutions Mumbai, the Devi Art Foundation).\n\nThe applied museum-and-heritage professional practice covers curatorial work (acquisition, exhibition development, scholarly research, collection interpretation), collections management (registration, documentation, storage, preservation oversight), conservation (the highly-specialised discipline of physical-object preservation through paintings, paper, textiles, metals, ceramics, sculpture, archaeological materials sub-specialisations), exhibition design and interpretation (with substantial overlap with the design-and-experience industry), education and public programs, museum administration, fundraising-and-development, the substantial digital-humanities-and-museum-tech specialty (digitisation projects, online-collections platforms, virtual-museum experiences accelerated post-2020), and historic-site-and-heritage management at the substantial UNESCO World Heritage Site network globally.\n\nFor a globally-mobile museum-and-heritage professional, credentials are moderately portable. The major museum-and-heritage employers operate global recruitment for senior curatorial and conservation positions. The conservation specialty is particularly cross-jurisdictionally-mobile because conservation expertise is structurally scarce and the technical-skills-and-credentialing operate through international standards (the ICOM-CC and AIC conservation-professional frameworks).\n\nCross-references: museum studies intersects with academy-humanities, human-root-archaeology, human-root-archhistory, human-root-classics, acadx-root-libscience, the lifestyle-culture vertical, and the broader heritage-tourism economy.