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Situated in Great Russell Street, London, the British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/) was created by an Act of Parliament in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759. Governed by a board of 25 trustees in accordance with the British Museum Act of 1963 and the Museums and Galleries Act of 1992, the museum is a nondepartmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The museum’s stated purpose is “to hold for the benefit and education of humanity a collection representative of world cultures and to ensure that the collection is housed in safety, conserved, curated, researched and exhibited” (British Museumn.d.).
The British Museum originated with the collection belonging to physician and naturalist, Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), which consisted of natural history specimens, ethnographic material, antiquities, jewelry, coins, medals, prints, and Orientalia. This was combined with a large library of manuscripts assembled by Sir Robert...
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References
Fitzgerald, N. 2012. Foreword, in The British Museum 2011/2012 review. London: The British Museum.
The British Museum Management and Governance. n.d. Available at: http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/management/museum_governance.aspx (accessed 28 October 2012).
Wilson, D. M. 2002. The British Museum: a history. London: The British Museum Press.
Further Reading
Bohrer, F.N. 1994. The times and spaces of history: representation, Assyria, and the British Museum, in D.J. Shearman & I. Rogoff (ed.) Museum culture: histories, discourses, spectacles: 197–222. University of Minnesota Press.
Coombes, A.E. 1994. Reinventing Africa: museums, material culture, and popular imagination in late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hoberman, R. 2011. Museum trouble: Edwardian fiction and the emergence of modernism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. 1992. Museums and the shaping of knowledge. London: Routledge.
Moser, S. 2006. Wondrous curiosities: ancient Egypt at the British Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schubert, K. 2009. The curator’s egg: the evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day. London: Ridinghouse.
Wilson, D. M. (ed.) 1989. The collections of the British Museum. London: British Museum Publications Ltd.
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Tully, C. (2014). British Museum. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1533
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