Museum in the context of "Natural history museums"

The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. Established in 1753, the British Museum was the first public national museum. In 2023, the museum received 5,820,860 visitors. At least one group rated it the most popular attraction in the United Kingdom.

At its beginning, the museum was largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. Some of its best-known acquisitions, such as the Greek Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, are subject to long-term disputes and repatriation claims.

The conservation and restoration of cultural property focuses on protection and care of cultural property (tangible cultural heritage), including artworks, architecture, archaeology, and museum collections. Conservation activities include preventive conservation, examination, documentation, research, treatment, and education. This field is closely allied with conservation science, curators and registrars.

The Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon (French: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, pronounced [myze de boz‿aʁ də ljɔ̃] ) is a municipal museum of fine arts in the French city of Lyon. Located near the Place des Terreaux, it is housed in a former Benedictine convent which was active during the 17th and 18th centuries. It was restored between 1988, and 1998, remaining open to visitors throughout this time despite the ongoing restoration works. Its collections range from ancient Egyptian antiquities to the Modern art period, making the museum one of the most important in Europe. It also hosts important exhibitions of art, for example the exhibitions of works by Georges Braque and Henri Laurens in the second half of 2005, and another on the work of Théodore Géricault from April to July 2006. It is one of the largest art museums in France.

Hagia Sophia, officially the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, is a mosque serving as a major cultural and historical site in Istanbul, Turkey. It was formerly a church (360–1453) and a museum (1935–2020). The last of three church buildings to be successively erected on the site by the Eastern Roman Empire, it was completed in AD 537, becoming the world's largest interior space and among the first to employ a fully pendentive dome. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have "changed the history of architecture". From its dedication in 360 until 1453 Hagia Sophia served as the cathedral of Constantinople in the Byzantine liturgical tradition, except for the period 1204–1261 when the Latin Crusaders installed their own hierarchy. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it served as a mosque, having its minarets added soon after. The site became a museum in 1935, and was redesignated as a mosque in 2020.

The current structure was built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I as the Christian cathedral of Constantinople between 532–537 and was designed by the Greek geometers Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles. It was formally called the Temple of God's Holy Wisdom, (Greek: Ναὸς τῆς Ἁγίας τοῦ Θεοῦ Σοφίας, romanized: Naòs tês Hagías toû Theoû Sophías) the third church of the same name to occupy the site, as the prior one had been destroyed in the Nika riots. As the episcopal see of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, it remained the world's largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until the Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520.

The Archaeological Museum of Delos (Greek: Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο Δήλου) is a museum on the island of Delos, near Mykonos in the South Aegean, Greece. It is noted for its extensive collection of statues unearthed in the surrounding area of the ancient site, which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Although the museum has a considerable collection, it does not contain all of the items found in Delos: a large quantity are on display in Athens at the National Archaeological Museum.

The Mouseion of Alexandria (Ancient Greek: Μουσεῖον τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας; Latin: Musaeum Alexandrinum), which arguably included the Library of Alexandria, was an institution said to have been founded by Ptolemy I Soter and his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Originally, the word mouseion meant any place that was dedicated to the Muses, often related to the study of music or poetry, but later associated with sites of learning such as Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum.

The Ptolemies reputedly established their Mouseion and Library with the intention of bringing together some of the best scholars of the Hellenistic world and to collect all the books known at the time. Although it did not imply a collection of works of art, the word mouseion is the root for the modern usage of the word museum.

The Musée d'Orsay (UK: /ˌmjuːzeɪ dɔːrˈseɪ/ MEW-zay dor-SAY, US: /mjuːˈzeɪ -/ mew-ZAY -⁠, French: [myze dɔʁsɛ]; English: Orsay Museum) is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built from 1898 to 1900. The museum holds mainly French art (including works by France based foreign artists) dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.

In 2022 the museum had 3.2 million visitors, up from 1.4 million in 2021. It was the sixth-most-visited art museum in the world in 2022, and second-most-visited art museum in France, after the Louvre.

Cultural policy is the government actions, laws and programs that regulate, protect, encourage and financially (or otherwise) support activities related to the arts and creative sectors, such as painting, sculpture, music, dance, literature, and filmmaking, among others and culture, which may involve activities related to language, heritage and diversity. The idea of cultural policy was developed at UNESCO in the 1960s. Generally, this involves governments setting in place processes, legal classifications, regulations, legislation and institutions (e.g., galleries, museums, libraries, opera houses, etc.) which promote and facilitate cultural diversity and creative expressions in a range of art forms and creative activities. Cultural policies vary from one country to another, but generally they aim to improve the accessibility of arts and creative activities to citizens and promote the artistic, musical, ethnic, sociolinguistic, literary and other expressions of all people in a country. In some countries, especially since the 1970s, there is an emphasis on supporting the culture of Indigenous peoples and marginalized communities and ensuring that cultural industries (e.g., filmmaking or TV production) are representative of a country's diverse cultural heritage and ethnic and linguistic demographics.

Cultural policy can be done at a nation-state level, at a sub-national level (e.g., U.S. states or Canadian provinces), at a regional level or at a municipal level (e.g., a city government creating a museum or arts centre). Examples of cultural policy-making at the nation-state level could include anything from funding music education or theatre programs at little to no cost, to hosting corporate-sponsored art exhibitions in a government museum, to establishing legal codes (such as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's 501(c)(3) tax designation for not-for-profit enterprises) and creating political institutions (such as the various ministries of culture and departments of culture and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States), arts granting councils, and cultural institutions such as galleries and museums. Similar significant organisations in the United Kingdom include the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and Arts Council England.

A library is a collection of books, and possibly other materials and media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or digital (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location, a virtual space, or both. A library's collection normally includes printed materials which can be borrowed, and usually also includes a reference section of publications which may only be utilized inside the premises. Resources such as commercial releases of films, television programmes, other video recordings, radio, music and audio recordings may be available in many formats. These include DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, cassettes, or other applicable formats such as microform. They may also provide access to information, music or other content held on bibliographic databases. In addition, some libraries offer creation stations for makers which offer access to a 3D printing station with a 3D scanner.

Libraries can vary widely in size and may be organised and maintained by a public body such as a government, an institution (such as a school or museum), a corporation, or a private individual. In addition to providing materials, libraries also provide the services of librarians who are trained experts in finding, selecting, circulating and organising information while interpreting information needs and navigating and analysing large amounts of information with a variety of resources. The area of study is known as library and information science or studies.