From Wonder Rooms to Public Institutions

SaveMPM.org — Collections & Public Trust Series

How Natural History Museums Evolved, Why They Created a New Vocabulary, and What That Language Was Built to Protect

The Milwaukee Public Museum traces its origins to 1851 — to a schoolteacher named Peter Engelmann who encouraged his students at the German-English Academy to bring back specimens from their explorations of the Wisconsin landscape. Those collections of rocks, insects, and pressed plants were the raw material from which a great public institution would eventually grow. But before the institution could grow, someone had to invent the concepts and the language needed to govern it. That language — collections, accession, deaccession, registrar, public trust — did not arrive pre-formed. It was built over three centuries, by practitioners and scholars and professional organizations, in response to the real challenges of caring for objects that belong not to any individual but to all of us.

Understanding where that language came from matters enormously right now in Milwaukee. Because what is happening to the Milwaukee Public Museum is, in part, a story about what happens when the language of collections stewardship is turned against the very framework it was designed to protect.

1. The Cabinet of Curiosities: Wonder Without Accountability

The story of natural history museums begins not with science but with wonder — and with the private accumulation of remarkable things. In 16th and 17th century Europe, wealthy aristocrats and scholars assembled what they called Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities: rooms filled with shells, fossils, taxidermied animals, ancient coins, anatomical specimens, and objects from distant civilizations brought back by explorers and traders. These collections had no systematic organization, no professional staff, no public mission. They existed to impress visitors and demonstrate the collector's wealth and cosmopolitan reach.

The first natural history museum recognizable in the modern sense was possibly that of Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner, established in Zurich in the mid-16th century. The National Museum of Natural History in Paris, established in 1635, was the first to take institutional form. The Ashmolean Museum, opened in England in 1683, was the first to grant regular admission to the general public. These early institutions began the slow transformation from private marvel to public resource — but they did so without any systematic framework for what they were doing or why.

The critical shift came in the 18th and 19th centuries, as public museums multiplied and began to understand themselves not merely as repositories of remarkable things but as institutions with civic obligations. The founding of the British Museum in 1753, the opening of the Louvre in 1793 during the French Revolution (when the royal art collection was declared the property of the nation), and the explosion of natural history institutions in the United States during the 1800s all reflected a new understanding: these collections belonged to the public, were funded by the public, and existed to serve the public. With that understanding came a pressing question — how do you actually do that?

2. The Problem of Scale and the Birth of Professional Practice

Early public museums were managed largely by amateurs — learned gentlemen who catalogued and cared for collections out of personal passion rather than professional training. As collections grew from hundreds of objects to thousands to millions, the amateur model became unworkable. Objects were lost, mislabeled, or deteriorated from neglect. Acquisitions were made without documentation. Objects donated by the public disappeared into storage without any record of where they had come from or what they were.

The foundational crisis of early museum management was simple: you cannot steward what you cannot find, and you cannot find what you have never properly documented.

The American response to this crisis is usually traced to 1881, when the US National Museum in Washington DC — today part of the Smithsonian — opened the first formal Registry Office in American museum history. Its intellectual architect was G. Brown Goode, the museum's assistant director, who in 1895 published Principles of Museum Administration. Goode's central argument was as simple as it was revolutionary: a specimen without documentation is a worthless object. It is unlisted, unknown, and effectively lost regardless of whether it sits in a storage drawer or on public display.

This principle — that documentation is not bureaucratic overhead but the fundamental act that makes an object a public resource — is the philosophical foundation on which all of modern collections management rests.

3. The Vocabulary Is Built from Practice

The specialized language of museum collections management did not originate in any single document or organization. It grew from the practical problems that practitioners encountered and solved, institution by institution, over more than a century. The terms were codified gradually, adopted unevenly, and formalized through professional organizations only after they had already become standard practice on the ground.

The word 'collection' itself is doing important work. A collection is not merely a pile of things — it is a purposeful, curated assembly held for a specific public mission. The shift from calling museum holdings 'curiosities' or 'specimens' to calling them a 'collection' tracks directly with the institutionalization of museums as civic entities.

'Accession' — from the Latin accessio, meaning an approach or addition — entered museum vocabulary as the formal act of legally adding an object to a museum's permanent collection. Accessioning is not merely receipt; it is a legal transaction that changes the status of an object. Before accession, an object arriving at a museum is a prospective acquisition. After accession, it is a collection object, held in public trust, governed by all the ethical and legal obligations that implies.

'Deaccession' — the mirror term — describes the formal removal of an object from the permanent collection. The word entered museum usage gradually through the mid-20th century and became a subject of intense professional and public debate as museums faced financial pressures and began to consider selling collection objects. The debate over deaccessioning — what conditions justify it, what may be done with proceeds, who must approve it — is one of the central ongoing controversies of the museum profession.

The distinction between 'accessioned' and 'non-accessioned' objects is where the vocabulary becomes most consequential for Milwaukee. Not everything in a museum building is part of the permanent collection. Museums also hold objects for operational and informational purposes that are not intended for permanent preservation — archives, library and educational media, and low-value exhibit props managed by the Exhibits Department. These non-accessioned materials are treated differently from collection objects. The distinction is legitimate and necessary. Both the 2016 and 2021 versions of MPM's Collections Policy use it precisely in this way, limiting 'Non-Accessioned Collections' to Archives, Library, Photograph, Education, and departmental teaching collections — informational and media materials, largely subject to copyright law. The critical question — urgently relevant at MPM today — is what happens when the 2025 Disposition Plan applies that category far beyond the meaning either policy document establishes, to encompass the built environments and dioramas that the public understands to be its permanent heritage.

4. The Registrar: The Person Who Makes Public Trust Real

If G. Brown Goode articulated the philosophy, it was the museum registrar who made it operational. The registrar's office — an American innovation, later adopted internationally — is the institutional mechanism by which the principles of documentation and public trust are translated into daily practice.

The role emerged formally in the late 19th century alongside Goode's registry model. By the mid-20th century it had become a recognized profession in the United States; in 1978 the Registrar's Committee was formally recognized by the American Association of Museums. The profession spread to Britain in the early 1970s and expanded through Europe over the following decades.

The registrar is responsible for creating and maintaining the documentation record for every object in the collection: its origin, provenance, condition, location, and all of its movements within and outside the institution. The registrar assigns the accession number that is the object's permanent identifier. The registrar tracks the object when it goes on loan, when it is sent for conservation, when it is displayed, and when it is formally deaccessioned. In a real and practical sense, the registrar is the person who makes public trust concrete. Without the registrar's work, the phrase 'held in public trust' is an aspiration without a mechanism.

At the Milwaukee Public Museum, as at all major institutions, the registrar's function sits at the center of the collections management system. The 2025 Disposition Plan — and the question of what authority MPM Inc. has to carry it out — is, in professional terms, a question about what falls within the registrar's domain of documentation and accountability, and what falls outside it. The answer, as the policy documents make clear, is that the built environments and historic exhibits fall squarely within the public trust framework that both the 2016 and 2021 Collections Policies establish.

5. AAM, ICOM, and the Codification of Standards

The American Alliance of Museums — founded in 1906 as the American Association of Museums, renamed in 2012 — is the primary organization responsible for setting national standards for museum practice in the United States. Its Code of Ethics for Museums, first issued in 1925 and most recently revised in 2000, is the foundational document of American museum ethics. Its accreditation program, which museums voluntarily apply for and must renew every ten years, is the primary mechanism by which those standards are enforced in practice.

The International Council of Museums, founded in 1946, performs an analogous function at the global level. ICOM's Code of Ethics for Museums establishes minimum standards for member institutions in more than 140 countries and has been particularly detailed in its treatment of deaccessioning, acquisition ethics, and the handling of culturally sensitive materials.

Both organizations arrived at their standards largely by codifying what practitioners were already doing. The AAM's early codes were relatively sparse; they grew more detailed over decades as controversies — deaccessioning scandals, looting of antiquities, conflicts over repatriation — forced the profession to make its principles explicit. ICOM's international scope meant it had to address a wider range of legal systems and cultural contexts, leading to more prescriptive language on some issues than the AAM's code.

The relationship between these organizations and the practitioners who do the actual work of collections management is genuinely collaborative. The AAM and ICOM did not invent these standards from above and impose them on an unwilling profession. They formalized and amplified what curators, registrars, and collections managers had already developed from necessity.

Conclusion: The Language Was Built to Protect Something

The vocabulary of museum collections management — collection, accession, deaccession, registrar, public trust, non-accessioned, built environment — exists because people solved real problems. Objects were lost. Donors were betrayed. Public heritage was sold for private gain. The professional framework that grew up over three centuries was an attempt to make those failures less likely and less catastrophic when they did occur.

The Milwaukee Public Museum was built in this tradition. Its collections of four million objects — assembled by generations of Milwaukee-area residents, funded by city and county taxpayers, documented by generations of registrars and curators — exist within this framework. The streets of Old Milwaukee, the European Village, the Rainforest, the dioramas that made MPM a model for institutions around the world: these were built by a public institution, for a public purpose, with public resources.

Understanding what the vocabulary means — and what it was designed to protect — is not academic background. It is the necessary foundation for understanding what is at stake in Milwaukee right now.

In the posts that follow, we will trace each piece of this framework: the legal and ethical genealogy of public trust, the specific mechanics of accession and deaccession, the special problem of built environments and dioramas, and the governance and oversight structures that exist — or should exist — to protect publicly owned collections when institutions transition.

SaveMPM.org — Collections & Public Trust Series

Post 1 of 5. Freely reproducible with attribution.

SaveMPM.org documents the Milwaukee Public Museum transition — examining public records, governance agreements, and asset classification decisions that affect publicly owned collections, exhibits, and historic environments.