[2] The purpose of modern museums is to collect, preserve, interpret, and display objects of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance for the study and education of the public.

Concurrently, as American colleges expanded during the 19th century, they also developed their own natural history collections to support the education of their students.

While there is an ongoing debate about the purposes of interpretation of a museum's collection, there has been a consistent mission to protect and preserve cultural artifacts for future generations.

Much care, expertise, and expense is invested in preservation efforts to retard decomposition in ageing documents, artifacts, artworks, and buildings.

As historian Steven Conn writes, "To see the thing itself, with one's own eyes and in a public place, surrounded by other people having some version of the same experience, can be enchanting.

They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.

While the American Alliance of Museums does not have such a definition, their list of accreditation criteria to participate in their Accreditation Program states a museum must: "Be a legally organized nonprofit institution or part of a nonprofit organization or government entity; Be essentially educational in nature; Have a formally stated and approved mission; Use and interpret objects or a site for the public presentation of regularly scheduled programs and exhibits; Have a formal and appropriate program of documentation, care, and use of collections or objects; Carry out the above functions primarily at a physical facility or site; Have been open to the public for at least two years; Be open to the public at least 1,000 hours a year; Have accessioned 80 percent of its permanent collection; Have at least one paid professional staff with museum knowledge and experience; Have a full-time director to whom authority is delegated for day-to-day operations; Have the financial resources sufficient to operate effectively; Demonstrate that it meets the Core Standards for Museums; Successfully complete the Core Documents Verification Program".

To serve its purpose as an exhibition space, deliberately focused on the theme of expensive horses used in equestrian arts, the interior and exterior of the palace-like stable were elaborately painted.

However, it was also accompanied by an ancestral gallery of the Wettin family, which was also open for viewing in the Long Corridor (Langer Gang) in Dresden starting in 1588, and a guidebook was created for it.

The main focus, however, remained on the horses, while the treatise "Reflections on How to Establish a Kunstkammer" by Gabriel Kaltenmarckt was already made available to Christian I starting in 1587.

[20]Other early museums began as the private collections of wealthy individuals, families or institutions of art and rare or curious natural objects and artifacts.

[24] The first museums in the form of cabinets of curiosities were, contrary to the above mentioned Dresden stable building, often accessible only for the middle and upper classes.

As Napoléon I conquered the great cities of Europe, confiscating art objects as he went, the collections grew and the organizational task became more and more complicated.

Chinese visitors in the early 19th century named these museums based on what they contained, so defined them as "bone amassing buildings" or "courtyards of treasures" or "painting pavilions" or "curio stores" or "halls of military feats" or "gardens of everything".

[32] The late twentieth century witnessed intense debate concerning the repatriation of religious, ethnic, and cultural artifacts housed in museum collections.

In the United States, several Native American tribes and advocacy groups have lobbied extensively for the repatriation of sacred objects and the reburial of human remains.

Some historians and scholars have criticized the British Museum for its possession of rare antiquities from Egypt, Greece, and the Middle East.

[42][43] Blue Shield has conducted extensive missions to protect museums and cultural assets in armed conflict, such as 2011 in Egypt and Libya, 2013 in Syria and 2014 in Mali and Iraq.

These elements of planning have their roots with John Cotton Dana, who was perturbed at the historical placement of museums outside of cities, and in areas that were not easily accessed by the public, in gloomy European style buildings.

The Brooklyn Museum's Luce Center for American Art practices this open storage where the public can view items not on display, albeit with minimal interpretation.

The Basque government agreed to pay $100 million for the construction of the museum, a price tag that caused many Bilbaoans to protest against the project.

[53] In the United States, similar projects include the 81,000 square foot Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia and The Broad in Los Angeles.

[56] Government funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest museum funder in the United States, decreased by 19.586 million between 2011 and 2015, adjusted for inflation.

Historian Steven Conn provocatively asks this question, suggesting that there are fewer objects in all museums now, as they have been progressively replaced by interactive technology.

This is not necessarily a negative development; Dorothy Canfield Fisher observed that the reduction in objects has pushed museums to grow from institutions that artlessly showcased their many artifacts (in the style of early cabinets of curiosity) to instead "thinning out" the objects presented "for a general view of any given subject or period, and to put the rest away in archive-storage-rooms, where they could be consulted by students, the only people who really needed to see them".

Additionally, the museum landscape has become so varied, that it may not be sufficient to use traditional categories to comprehend fully the vast variety existing throughout the world.

Museums also can be based on the main source of funding: central or federal government, provinces, regions, universities; towns and communities; other subsidised; nonsubsidised and private.

[49]: 9–18  Through this, people are encouraging others to consider this missing perspective, when looking at museum collections, as every object viewed in such environments was placed by an individual to represent a certain viewpoint, be it historical or cultural.

In 2019 the workers in multiple museums voted to form unions with more protesting to press for a fair contract and against unfair labor practices.

The contract negotiated would provide a wage increase, protection against termination without cause, and direct access to trustees and policy-making processes at the museum.