Different Types of Museums

There are different types of museums. Here are some of them:

Archaeology museums. They display archeological artifacts. They can be open-air museums or exhibit items in a building.

Art museums. Also known as art galleries. They are spaces for showing art objects, most commonly visual art objects such as paintings, sculptures, photography, illustrations, drawings, ceramics, or metalwork. The first publicly owned art museum in Europe was Amerbach-Cabinet in Basel (Now Kunstmuseum Basel).

Encyclopedic museums. They are usually large institutions and offer visitors a wide variety of information on many local and global themes. They are not thematically defined or specialized.

Historic house museums. A house or a building turned into a museum for various reasons, most commonly because the person living in it was important or something important happened. House is often equipped with furniture like it was when it was used. Visitors of the house learn through guides that tell the story of the house and its inhabitants.

History museums. They collect objects and artifacts that tell a chronological story about the locality. Collected objects could be documents, artifacts, archeological findings, and others. They could be in a building, a historic house, or a historic site.

Living history museums. Type of a museum in which actors perform historical events to immerse a viewer and show how certain events looked like or how some crafts were performed because there is no other way to see them now because they are obsolete.

Maritime museums. Specialized museums for displaying maritime history, culture, or archaeology. Primarily maritime archaeological museums exhibit artifacts and preserved shipwrecks recovered from bodies of water. Maritime history museums show and educate the public about humanity's maritime past.

Military and war museums. Museums specialize in military histories and are usually organized from the point of view of one nation and conflicts in which that country has taken part. They collect and present weapons, uniforms, decorations, war technology, and other objects.

Mobile museums. Museums that have no specific strict place for exhibiting. They could be exhibited from a vehicle or moved from museum to museum as guests—a name for parts of a museum's exhibitions sent to another museum.

Natural history museums. Usually display objects from nature like stuffed animals or pressed plants. They educate about natural history, dinosaurs, zoology, oceanography, anthropology, evolution, environmental issues, and more.

Open-air museums. Characteristic for exhibiting outdoors. Exhibitions consist of buildings that recreate architecture from the past. It first opened in Scandinavia near the end of the 19th century.

Pop-up museums. Nontraditional museum institutions. Made to last short and often rely on visitors to provide museum objects and labels, while professionals or institutions only provide themes. With that is constructed shared historical authority. Science museums. They are specialized in science and the history of science. In the beginning, they were static displays of objects, but now they are made so the visitors can participate and, that way, better learn about different branches of science.