National Museums is the first book to explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting national contexts. Composed of new studies of countries that rarely make a showing in the English-language studies of museums, this book reveals how these national museums have been used to create a sense of national self, place the nation in the arts, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, ethnicity and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent...

Confronting contemporary issues in museum practice, this collection provides a practical guide to all aspects of collections care.

Contributors cover a wide range of issues including:

• conservation practice
• the monitoring and control of light
• relative humidity and atmospheric pollution
• packing, handling and transportation of collections
• storage and access to collections
• biological infestation
• disaster planning.

Including material and sources that have, up until now, not easily been available,...