The Fractal Taxonomy of Museums

Posted on Sep 4, 2012

I’m about to break my own rule, and talk about nouns.

Specifically, names.

Hyper-specifically, AAM’s name. You may have heard the buzz over the last week, as people notice that our web page quietly announced “The Association is now the Alliance.” Bloggers and tweeters and listserve-posters pounced on our rechristening, speculating what it might mean. Tomorrow you’ll find out all about it, as AAM officially announces how the organization behind the name is changing to meet the future. For now, I’m just gonna ask:

What do all these organizations have in common? (Jump to end for the reveal)

Aquariums

With charismatic marine megafauna (dolphins, seals, penguins, whales)
Without charismatic marine megafauna
Specific to their local ecosystem
Featuring global collections
With dolphin shows
Without dolphin shows

Art Museums

Featuring encyclopedic, global collections
Featuring culturally-specific collections
Featuring a single artist
That focus on modern/contemporary art

with permanent collection
without permanent collections

Focused on particular media (photography, film, sculpture)
Focused on particular themes (wildlife, Western, religious, advertising, book illustration)
Inside universities/colleges
Inside larger art complexes
Art museums inside historic houses
Art museums with public gardens
Sculpture parks (that may also be gardens)
Formal and stuffy
Not formal OR stuffy
Museums in landmark “pillars of society” buildings
Museums in new “starchitect” designed palaces
Museums best navigated with a Segway, bag lunch and a ball of twine
Museums that are little more than one room

Botanic Gardens

Primarily decorative/display
Research/conservation oriented
Attached to an historic house
Attached to an art museum
Inside a cemetery
Featuring public art
Focused on particular taxonomic specialties (trees, cacti, roses)
Historic (featuring heirloom plants, or recreating a particular time period)
With children’s gardens
Without children’s gardens

Children’s/Youth Museum

Focused on toddlers and moms with infants
Collecting
Non-collecting
Has a pretend supermarket

With culturally-specific groceries

Doesn’t have a pretend supermarket
With/without a garden

General Museum

Combination of a history & a natural history museum
Combination of a history & and art museum
Combination of art & natural history
Combination of a history, art & natural history museum
Little bit of everything

With a mummy
No mummy

Historic House/Site

Interpreting an historic time period
Interpreting a famous person
Restored
Unrestored
With landscaped grounds
With a working/demonstration farm
Featuring immersive, first person interpretation
Reproductions of sites/settlements/villages
National Historic Landmarks
Battlefields
Archaeological digs
Containing art
Not containing art

History Museum/Historical Society

Specific to a state
Specific to a city
Specific to a county
Specific to a region
Specific to a particular ethnic group
Specific to a particular event

Specific to a war
Specific to an assassination
Specific to an act of terror
Specific to a piece of legislation or declaration

Specific to a particular industry (textiles, steel, ship building, soft drink manufacturing)
Military museums (those that don’t classify themselves as “specialized museums”)
With an archive/library
Without an archive/library
With an archive but not a library
With a library but not an archive
Featuring some Big Things like trains, planes, automobiles, submarines, machine tools (but not exclusively, because then they tend to classify themselves as “specialized”)

Natural History/Anthropology

Supporting research collections
Not supporting research collections
Focused on dead, non-human animals, & plants
Focused on dead people & the artifacts they made
With dinosaurs

Real specimens
Casts and reproductions only

Without dinosaur
With fossils of things without backbones
Those with live animals and plants on exhibit
Those without live animals and plants on exhibit
Housing fluid collections in explosion-proof, specially vented storage rooms
Not having fluid collections (and therefore not needing explosion-proof, specially vented storage rooms)
Associated with a university
Or not
Science-based
Creationism-based

Nature Centers

Associated with a national park
Associated with a state park
Associated with a city park
Just sitting out there by themselves
With living collections
Or not
Or non-living collections
Or not

Science Technology Center/Museums

With permanent collections
Without permanent collections
With research collections
Without research collections
With a giant Tesla coil
Without a giant Tesla coil
Featuring a Maker Lab
Not featuring a Maker Lab
With a Large Format Theatre
Without an LFT
Institutions with planetariums
Institutions without planetariums
Institutions that ARE planetariums

Specialized Museums

Culturally specific museums

Museums about Native Americans

Run by Native Americans
Not run by Native Americans

Museums about planes
Museums about trains

With working trains
Without working trains

Museums about automobiles
Or motorcycles
Museums about ships (aka “large rotting objects”)
Military museums (those that don’t classify themselves as history museums)
Culturally specific museums (that don’t consider themselves to be history museums)
Textile museums
Except when they specifically identify as quilt museums
Halls of Fame
Sports museums (which often contain halls of fame)
Music museums (which also often contain halls of fame)
Toy museums
Museums of specific products (paperweights, mustard, shoes, typewriters, barbed wire, umbrella covers)

Zoos

With classic terrestrial charismatic megafauna (elephants, lions, tigers)
Without classic terrestrial charismatic megafauna
With botanic gardens integrated into their grounds
Without botanic gardens integrated into their grounds
With petting zoos
Without petting zoos
With Greater Pandas
With only Lesser Pandas
No pandas

OK, yes, I’m poking gentle fun at the infinite distinctions we museumers draw between ourselves. (With many thanks to my far-flung colleagues who contributed to the taxonomy of their own segment of the museum field. To misquote Homer Simpson—“it’s only funny when it’s true.”)

But it is a serious topic. When we get together to talk business, breakout sessions are fine—big art museum directors in one room, small museum administrators in another, college and university museums up the hall. However, we also need to come together in a plenary session, the big AND small museums, art AND zoos, history AND science, to identify what we have in common, pool our collective wisdom and influence, and become a force big enough to shape the world.

To become, in fact, an alliance: to be allies in a common cause. And to rally, not just museum staff and independent professionals and people who make stuff for museums and provide services to museums, but everyone who cares about museums and the work we do.

So, is this just a name change for AAM? No, it’s a reflection of a far deeper and far reaching metamorphosis of what we hope to achieve and how we plan to accomplish it. But for more on that, you are going to have to wait for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, happy tweeting.

As a biologist, I know that all taxonomies are incomplete. The nucleus of the classification scheme above was the framework we used to use for the old Museum Financial Information survey and other AAM data collection, which is being superseded by a new set of categories created by IMLS in collaboration with the field. As to the humorous subdivisions, please use the comment section below to share how you see your subsection of the field.

Elizabeth Merritt, Founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums

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