Science Museums and Science Centers

On Saturday, our department at the museum had their “Betriebs- ausflug” or organizational field trip. This is an annual affair, often to some nearby place of interest, with a tour, lunch, hike, and plenty of time to get to know co-workers. Our trip was to Oberammergau (see pictures), an amazingly picturesque Bavarian town known world-wide for wood carving and their production of the passion play, which takes place for an entire year once each decade (next production in 2010).



I had many interesting conversations with staff members and researchers working on a wide variety of historical topics ranging from educational philosophy to the impacts of agricultural technology to how the Nazis sponsored developments in loud speaker technology to promote their propaganda efforts.

The first activity of the day was a visit to the Oberammergau Heimat Museum. Heimat museums are common, and depict history and everyday live associated with an area. The one here had a remarkable collection of carved figures like this wandering woodcarver and Christmas crèches (one had been developed by many carvers over a period of 100+ years and included over 200 individual figures), wood carvings, rooms depicting the lives of different classes of people, etc. Later, the group hiked to a monestary in Ettal, the next town. The church there was exquisitely decorated, you can see.

In conversations about museums, you quickly get the sense of an interesting distinction here in Germany between science museums and science centers. As a civil engineer who switched careers into the museum field, I hadn’t been very aware in the U.S. of tension between these two flavors of institutions, which is however quite evident here.

In the U.S., organizations such as the Institute of Museum and Library Services and our American Association of Museums may have a check-off box on their applications along the lines of: Are you a “collecting” or “non-collecting” museum? To the casual observer, that’s about it. Our “collecting” museums often create interactive exhibitions just as do science centers, and in the U.S., you will hear the terms “science museum” and science center” uttered in the same sentence, pretty much interchangeably. The Association of Science-Technology Centers includes both museums and centers and doesn’t seem to make much of a distinction between the two, as far as I can tell.

Here, however, many people have mentioned that issues of funding, audience, and educational goals come into play. Museums preserve important historical objects and have a long history of state support. On the other hand, science centers do not (typically) collect objects of historical significance but compete for funding with museums. The audiences can differ, with museums attracting older audiences who are more likely to read labels and appreciate the historical significance of their objects, while science centers attract younger, family groups which, in general, may be more interested in hands-on, family experiences of a more immediate (and less historical and scholarly) nature.

The exhibition goals of a museum are often closely connected with the academic interests of the curators – what they select for display and how – while in a science center the goals may have more to do with what will attract and engage children and families. Both naturally share a dependence on special funding for their exhibition projects, but an exhibition in a "museum" might have more text and wall panels with information, as opposed to a science center, which might focus more on hands-on interactives in their approach to a topic.

Of course, there in reality a mix, and museums do include some hands-on interactive exhibits, and science centers may include some historical or non-interactive collected objects. But people do make the distinction.