Is There a Future for Old-Fashioned Museums?

"It's really interesting that we've never been able to write the definition of a museum and say here's who's in and here's who's out," says Elizabeth E. Merritt, director of museum advancement and excellence for the American Association of Museums, the trade's umbrella group.

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To be a museum, for example, do you have to have artifacts? Well then, what about planetariums? The AAM counts them in.

If museums are about interpreting the past, is the Manassas Battlefield a museum?

"Historic sites are also museums. It's really slippery," Merritt says. "To some extent it's the primacy of the experience. So maybe the battlefield doesn't have an object. But in some ways the land itself is the object. You could exactly re-create Manassas in Texas or California. . . . Heck, you could even make it more like it was back then than the real one is today. But it wouldn't be the same. Because people want to stand there and know that that is the ground where the battle was fought and where people died. It's a deeply human thing."

If it's about connecting to the past, is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial a museum?

"I would say yes," Merritt says. "Looking at the way people interact with it, to me it is very much the way people interact with a museum. It's an emotional give and take. I've seen people cry in museums."

So museums do not need to have artifacts, and they do not even need to have buildings. Is emotional response the key thing?

"It's hard to pin down," Merritt says. "But it is something about reality. Even if you're in a science museum, where all they have is machinery, what they're telling you about is gravity, heat, Newton's laws of motion. Those are real. They're just trying to find indirect ways for you to see them."

What about the Bible-inspired Creation Museum in Kentucky?

"They are using exhibits and artifacts to try and explore their worldview and educate people in things they believe are important," Merritt says.

So it's important for a museum to be a place that attempts to portray a vision of "the truth"?

"Absolutely," Merritt says. "Now, different museums might come to different conclusions about what the truth is. You're not going to get people at the Creation Museum telling you the same story about Earth as the American Museum of Natural History. But they are deeply, intellectually committed to the fact that they're right."