Museums theme – Adventures in Museology: category building over a century, and the context for experiments in reinvigorating the Science Museum at the turn of the twenty-first century

This article serves as an introduction to this issue’s Museums theme, also represented by the contributions of Dirk van Delft, Peter Donhauser, Martha Fleming and Jennifer Landry. Together these papers look at how the modern science museum has re-created itself in recent years. This introduction argues that a key moment of change in the late 1980s and early 1990s marked a crisis to which science museums had to respond or be consigned to history. The introduction sets the scene, by discussing the longer-term development of the science museum as a category, and by describing the short-term context of that widely perceived crisis in the science museum around the turn of the twenty-first century.