"Science is any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation. In general, a science involves a pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operations of fundamental laws." (Encyclopaedia, 1994).
Museology is a part of the information sciences (Feather, 1996:303), dealing with the information that is created in museum collections, in dialogue with museum objects. Information science is a social science, and alongside the social are, on the one hand, the fundamental and applied natural and technical sciences, and on the other, the humanities, which in English do not attract the term science but are classified among academic disciplines. All these controversies and ambivalences that can be seen in the terminology are also reflected in the relationship between museology and science, as well as in the relationship between museum and science (Pearce, 1996:1-2). We could also say that museology is a social science that deals with objects important for other sciences and academic disciplines, in the endeavour to preserve them as documents of the time and to provide interpretations of their significance and communicate it to people in all future present times.
Museum objects are sources of information, and they are collected together so that they should be preserved as testimonies to human life, society and development on the one hand, and to human interests, stimuli and meanings on the other. The information that is created and registered in the processes of communication with potential and actual museum objects is a part of the process of the creation of human knowledge. There are two fundamental kinds (Tudjman, 1983:90). Selective or scientific information is a part of exact, analytic scientific research. Structural or cultural information is, on the other hand, a part of the synthesis of conclusions about the significance, worth, point or purpose of individual objects, where the social and historical environment and the passage of time are the fundamental factors that have left their mark upon the objects. In other words, the origins and functions of the object are just as important a source of information as the life and duration of and changes to it. Some of the changes in society and significance have left no trace upon the naterial or form of the object, and they have to be sought and found in the physical, temporal and social surroundings of the object.
The categorization of science began in earnest in the 17th century. This was part of an endeavour to classify all human knowledge in terms of a lattice determined by system and content. In time, hard and fast distinctions began to be created between the natural sciences and technology on the one hand and the social and humanist sciences on the other. Their development went on in parallel, without substantial points of contact.
Accordingly, the British terminological distinction should not surprise us. The concept of the museum is in itself also controversial. It arose in ancient times as the house of the muses, dedicated to spiritual values, and only in the Renaissance did it become a place in which rare and valuable things are kept; nevertheless, right until the 19th century, it retained this original meaning as a place for learning and the acquisition of knowledge (Maroević, 1998:44).
Museum collections followed the fundamental division created in the 15th century into "curiosa naturalia" and "curiosa artificialia", collecting the objects of the material world accordingly. On the one hand there were objects picked out of the natural world, and on the other were those that were the work of the human hand. The germs of what was covered in part by the human or social sciences were collections of manuscripts, or objects found in excavations. Only later were collections of paintings and sculptures to become part of the contents of museums. The age of Mannerism brought in a kind of interpretation of the world via collected objects, and the similarities among things encouraged the art of memory (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992:79). All these controversies, along with collapse of the rationalist attempt to cover the entire world by acts of classification, led, after the phenomenon of the Enlightenment, to a new zest for specialist thinking.
The nineteenth century developed the need for museums to be divided according to type of material and to make their collections available as support for individual academic disciplines. If we group them, we shall see that as well as general, there then appeared specialised museums such as archaeological, art, natural history, technical, historical and ethnographic or anthropological, later to diverge into still lower-ranked specialisations. These divisions came into as a direct reflection of the linkage between museums and the development of science, but also as embodying the support that museum collections lent to individual sciences or academic disciplines (primarily to the natural sciences, to archaeology and ethnology).
Museology deals with the structure, identification and communication of the messages of museum objects. The input elements are the result of the academic research into museum objects, and also of the identification of their diverse identities. If we enumerate them only as the conceptual, factual, actual, structural, functional and historical identities, we shall see that they cover the content of the object from the moment it comes into being in human consciousness to the encounter with it in every one of the moments of the present. This wide range of interests, from the origin and life of the object, via its identification and recognition and preservation, to the many aspects of its exposition and interpretation, demands the convergence of many academic disciplines. The result is the interpretation and communication of the messages, the creation and transmission of knowledge.
Museology opens up new forms of knowledge with respect to the heritage, and as the symbolic product of its relationship with a fundamental scientific or academic discipline. If we accept the definition that knowledge is a physical structure so organised as to contain intelligence, then two forms of knowledge are developed through the intermediacy of museological research: formatted and contextualised knowledge (Tudjman, 1986:150). Formatted knowledge is the result of the application of scientific methods and the result ofresearchby the fundamentalscientific disciplines in the study of the heritage and of the museum objects. It is founded on a series of items of information obtained from research into the museum object. But contextualised knowledge is the result of the determination of the value and significance of the object in various living and museum contexts. It consists of a series of items of cultural information with the aid of which an aura is created around an individual object. It becomes worthy of attention, or, alternatively, becomes relegated to a secondary level of importance.
The communication of knowledge is the fundamental social function of the museum, if we make protection and study subservient to communication. We value a museum according to what we can see in it and according to the manner it is presented to us. The main forms of museum communication, exhibitions (if we ignore at this moment virtual reality and forms of communication at that level), help us to identify the difference between the representation and presentation of knowledge (Maroević, 1998:227), i.e., the difference between the past and the present. The representation of knowledge is based on the museological concept, in which the authors of the exhibition have assembled the full range of knowledge about a given theme and presented it to the public. They have summed up the past and represented it in the present. The presentation of knowledge happens at the exhibition itself, it is something that is created at the moment when we interface with the message of the exhibition and with the objects put on show. The range of the presentation of knowledge can be recorded and represented at some other, future exhibition. It expands the contextualised knowledge about an object and contributes to a new interpretation of reality.
The musem object is a connection between museology and the fundamental scientific discipline. Its components, material, form and meaning (Maroević, 1998:138) make possible a broad analytical approach, characteristic of scientific investigation, and also a synthetic approach, in which each one of the components, and all of them together, are brought to bear on the temporal, spatial or social systems within which the museum object lives or lived. The fundamental scientific or academic disciplines provide the skills, the experience and the specialist knowledge for the language of the material and form of the object to be understood.
Museology on the other hand contributes interest in the characteristics of the object, the multi-layeredness of its significance. Their approaches are integrated and it is possible to divide them only in minor segments of research into the museum object. If we can agree that the museum object is the source, bearer and transmitter of the information and knowlegde, then science and culture participate together with museology in the identification of those elements of the museum object according to which it is a document of the reality in which it came into being and in which it lived.
Museum collections are distinctive collective organisms. They are special entities, comprising museum objects. They have their own separate life, which is a way dualistic, analytical and synthetic at the same time. It is analytical to the extent that every object in the collection contributes to the creation of the whole, and it is within it that the object constitutes a unit worthy of investigation, capable of presenting its message. It is, though, synthetic in that the collection affects the policy and the criteria for collecting, through which a common value of interrelationships is created, which is higher than the sum of the individual values of the objects.
Ethnographic and social history collections cover, in their material and interest, a wide range of human existence, life and history. They document everyday life, customs and traditions. Many forgotten ideas, skills and way of life, as well as relationships among people and social groups, can be recognised in the objects of the material culture that are gathered in collections and museums of this kind. The cultural and spiritual life of people is reflected in the same way. Connected by invisible bonds to the objects of ritual and belief, it is transferred symbolically to the objective world and strings of significances become linked to the objects. In parallel, a great deal of the knowledge about human attitudes to nature, production, the economy, the standard of living can be obtained during the gathering, research into and interpretation of these collections. Many parallel worlds can be revealed, which can support the exact approach of other, fundamental scientific disciplines.
The museological approach is not competitive or opposed, but complementary, to the other scientific analytical approaches. It searches for significance, finding it in the objects that have acquired it during their history and existence. This non-material side of things, which cannot be confirmed by experiment, and for which the confirmation of the action of the fundamental laws does not work, in a search for a knowledge that will draw attention to general truths, but in the board aspect of social reality and the human world. This kind of approach draws attention to the fact that quite frequently the significance of an object is not contained in its material, structure and form. It reflects and radiates the significance that people have added on to it. This is, put metaphorically, a kind of spiritual energy that is accumulated and discharged via the agency of the material existence of the object and its capacity to accumulate and emit, as well as to reflect, human messages. Museums and collections are in this context the generators of such energy.
The danger lies in the possible idealisation of the object, as well as of the messages that are constituted in museum exhibitions. This is a phenomenon that evades the category of science and the scientific approach. This kind of superstructure is a construction that cannot withstand the judgement of time, and sometimes is actually a sign of the times or a reflection of the reality of a given milieu. The experience of Nazism and communism is not temporally very distant from us. Science, in this context, rebuts (over the long term) significances that are not appropriate to the object or the collection. In time an equilibrium is archieved, and the ideological component becomes only a part of the life of the object in the museum context.
The great challenge facing ethnographic and social history museums is to collect today for tomorrow, and thus to give support to the present from the point of view of manifesting its values and traits. In this way they are selecting the material culture of today to be a document of this time to future generations. The selection criteria become a priority concern, it being necessary to include the scientific approach, as one of the required components.
The virtual museum is gradually transforming the material world into a two- or three-dimensional copy of itself. Such museums have introduced a number of stimuli and opportunities, as well as a number of restrictions vis a vis the material structure. Information about the object becomes more important than the object itself. The opportunities to manipulate things are multiplied with a speed previously undreamed of, and thus change the relation between the museum and science. When a museum object is put into digital form, it begins to live a life that diverges from the life of the real object. All the challenges of gradual mutations are practically here in front of us. Whether science can ensure the credibility of virtual museums, at least at that level at which it takes part in the confirmation of the value of the material world collected in museum collections, is a question that is already being asked today. A very close connectedness between museology and contemporary science will be of very great benefit to future considerations. We can see it in the direction of the more appropriate identification and selection of objects for the museum collection, in the direction of a very high level of protection for the museum material, and finally in the direction of regulating the process of the transition of museum material into the virtual world.
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