u Museums of 'human suffering' and the struggle for human rights - Terence M. Duffy

u The Terezín Memorial in the year 2000 - Jan Munk

u 'Back to the Workhouse': poverty from the past serving the present - Susanna Smith

u The Gulag Museum - Victor Shmyrov

u The paradox of the Anne Frank House - Marja Verbraak

u Women's Rights National Historical Park: where 'rights' are our mission - Vivien Ellen Rose

u The Ecomuseum in Fresnes: against exclusion - Coral Delgado

u Virtual museums in Turkey - Tomur Atagok & Oguzhan Ozcan

u The Vienna Kunsthalle - its future in the Museum Quarter - Gerald Matt

Practice

u Ethnology: a science on display - Fabrice Grognet

Viewpoint

u Bridges: a museum for a globalizing world - Tomislav Sola

Cultural guide

u Museums and heritage: a major issue in the UNESCO World Culture Report 2000 - Isabelle Vinson

Summary of Articles

Ruth J. Abram is the founder and president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. An activist turned historian, Ms Abram holds graduate degrees in social welfare and American history, and has done pioneering work in the use of history for social issues. Her landmark work at the Tenement Museum has been widely covered in the media in the United States, including the New York Times, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and the Public Broadcasting System series on the history of New York. Her work indeed sheds light on history from the point of view of those who are often left out of the history books.

u Museums of 'human suffering' and the struggle for human rights - Terence M. Duffy

Following the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Terence M. Duffy describes museum exhibits of 'human suffering' and the struggle for human rights, particularly recent museums and proposals for museums in places where genocide has occurred, or where human beings were held in bondage. Human rights issues constitute important subjects for museums, from concentration camps to museums of slavery. Professor Duffy teaches Peace Studies at the University of Ulster and directs the Irish Peace Museum Project.

u The Terezín Memorial in the year 2000 - Jan Munk

Jan Munk has twice been elected president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic. He has been director of the Terezín Memorial since 1990. He holds a special interest in this memorial, since his parents were transported to the Terezín Ghetto in 1941 and later Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. He was born in Prague in 1946, where he studied sociology and philosophy at Charles University. He has devoted his professional career as a sociological researcher to the problems of students. His article discusses not only the physical aspects of the memorials to Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia, but also touches on the museological problems encountered when a totalitarian regime rewrites history for the purpose of ideological deformation.

u 'Back to the Workhouse': poverty from the past serving the present - Susanna Smith

In 1997, The National Trust and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and Wales conducted a survey of surviving workhouses and identified the Workhouse, Southwell, as the best and most important surviving example. The National Trust acquired the building, and a project team from East Midlands office are now working to reconstruct the site. The anticipated opening date will be Easter 2002. The story of this particular workhouse site will be told but, more importantly, the vision of a system covered the United Kingdom will be provided as a national example. Ion this way, the property will become a national and international focus for Poor Law history. Susanna Smith is a qualified archivist and architectural historian in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British architecture and history. As a National Trust Project Researcher, and a member of the project team for the Workhouse, Mrs Smith carries out documentary and oral history research on the Workhouse and has already published several articles on this project

u The Gulag Museum - Victor Shmyrov

In the final period of the communist regime, the Perm-36 Maximum Security Camp was the last and most dangerous prison in the former Soviet Union. One of the few gulag-era camps still standing, it has been used to house the Gulag Museum.  As it exposes its history of repression, this museum is also intended to be a 'museum of tragedy': the tragedy of tens of millions who went through the political repression of the gulag system. But it is also the tragedy of the hundreds of millions of citizens of the former Soviet Union and socialist countries, who watched as the ideals of a just society were turned into one of the most antihuman regimes ever devised. Since December 1998, the Gulag Museum programme has acquired international status and has been accepted as a collaborative project of the Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression and Totalitarianism at Perm-36. Victor Shmyrov is the director of the Memorial Museum.

u The paradox of the Anne Frank House - Marja Verbraak

Anne Frank was 15 years old when she died in Bergen-Belsen in March 19454. The moving diary which she kept up to date during the period in hiding was published in 1947 in Dutch, and subsequently in over fifty-five languages world-wide, giving a voice to the 6 million Jews killed during the Second World War. Over 800, 000 people come each year to visit the house located at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam where she hid with her parents for two years and wrote her famous diary. The renovation and reopening of this site in 1999, made necessary by such a heavy volume of visitors, is described in this article by Marja Verbraak, a journalist who formerly worked in the public relations office of the Anne Frank House.

u Women's Rights National Historical Park: where 'rights' are our mission - Vivien Ellen Rose

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M'Clintock, Martha Wright and Jane Hunt were no ordinary middle-class American housewives, and the Women's Rights National Historical Park in the United States commemorates their activism. Vivien Ellen Rose, historian at the park, is responsible for the historical content of the exhibits and programmes. The stated goal of the park is to 'inspire and educate visitors about the struggle of women for their equal rights', and this article presents some of the recent activities aimed at attaining those ends.

u The Ecomuseum in Fresnes: against exclusion - Coral Delgado

The working-class town of Fresnes, in the Paris suburbs, is the site of an ecomuseum founded with a view to conserving, presenting and explaining the specific territory of the town and problems related to urban development. Built first and foremost, this museum was created to give a voice to those who have traditionally been unable to express themselves: women doing manual labour, prisoners, immigrants, the unemployed, and those living in housing projects. Born in Caracas, author of several articles on the relationship between cultural identity and museums, the sociologist Coral Delgado holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of Paris and a diploma from the Ecole du Louvre. She is currently a lecturer at the Simon Bolívar University in Caracas.

u Virtual museums in Turkey - Tomur Atagok & Oguzhan Ozcan

Turkey's Internet network is rapidly expanding and the number of Internet operators, currently estimated at 150, 000 is constantly rising. This has had considerable impact on the museum sector, as described by two pioneering figures. Professor Tumor Atagok is chairperson and founder of the first Department of Museum Studies in Turkey. A vice-director of the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture between 1980 and 1984 and the author of numerous articles on aspects of Turkish art and museums, she was also a Fulbright scholar working in a number of museums in the United States. Associate Professor Oguzhan Ozcan is vice-dean of the Faculty of Art and Design and chairman of the Department of Multimedia Design at Yildiz Technical University. He worked on various web museum projects for the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, the Topkapi Palace Museum, the Dolmabahce Palace, the Rahmi Koc Museum and the Interactive Museum of Turkey. He holds Turkey's first teaching professorship in multimedia design and has published a number of papers in this field.

u The Vienna Kunsthalle - its future in the Museum Quarter - Gerald Matt

The museum scene in Vienna will no longer be the same – instead, it will be more exciting, more attractive and more competitive by international standards, states Gerald Matt, the artistic and managing director of the Vienna Kunsthalle in this article. He presents the architectural and artistic decisions that went into the conception of the Kunsthalle in the Museum Quarter, and he discusses the role it will play, particularly for modern art in Vienna, where, in 'an environment of Baroque tradition and historical grandeur, the new Kunsthalle has something of a meteorite' about it.

u Ethnology: a science on display - Fabrice Grognet

If ethnology has something to tell us, the ethnographic object remains, for its part, all too frequently silent'. So saying, Fabrice Grognet shows how, despite constant evolution and change, ethnographic museums are still far from having found a way to make their collections speak. The author is an assistant at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. He holds a diploma of advanced studies in museology from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and an M.A. in ethnology from the Sorbonne.

u Bridges: a museum for a globalizing world - Tomislav Sola

Tomislav Sola is professor of museology at the University of Zagreb and a member of the jury of the European Museum of the Year Award. Furthermore, he is a visionary, as his article so amply demonstrates. In his recent book Essays on Museums and their Theory: Towards a Cybernetic Museum he set out his views that a humanist concept of the heritage and should serve as a tool of development and public service. For him, the museum exists not only to mirror our identity but also to provide the critical insight that enables us constantly to re-evaluate the past. The museum he imagines below has not yet been created, but Sola's dream is well worth sharing.

u Museums and heritage: a major issue in the UNESCO World Culture Report 2000 - Isabelle Vinson

Joining the so-called 'information society' is a critical issue for cultural institutions, perhaps especially for the institutions most concerned with tangible and monumental cultural heritage, such as museums. Since the dawn of public interest in Internet communication networks, museums have had a proactive role to play in cyberculture. The discussion on virtual museums has revolved principally around the question of the categories of sites over the past few years, but it will be essential in the future to include the role of virtual museums on cultural knowledge in a way that will encompass other types of cultural content.