Museology. Museum studies. It’s the study of museums, including how they impact society. Operational museology is the field of, well, making a good museum.

Museology is, needless to say, a recent field. And it’s in many ways a meta one, because the study of what museums do inevitably feeds back into how to make museums do what you want.

At a base level, museology includes assessing whether a museum is good or bad at what it does.

So, let’s talk a bit about how museums have developed over time.