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 i ssue’s Museums theme, a lso 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 recreated i tsel f in recent years . This introduction argues that a key moment of change in the late 1980s and early 1990s marked a cris is to which science museums had to respond or be cons igned to history. The introduction sets the scene, by discuss ing the longer-term development of the science museum as a category, and by describing the short-term context of that widely perceived cris is in the science museum around the turn of the twenty-fi rst century.