THE DOCUMENTARY ESSENCE OF MUSEUM OBJECT: CULTUROLOGICAL APPROACH

The article considers the problems of using the documentary approach for disclosing the essence of museum object and museum documentation. There is substantiated the need for the concept of “museum document” and for the culturological approach to its studying.

A short excursion into the history of museum objects stu­dying shows that museum studies equate the concepts of “do­cument” and “museum object”, the aspectual dependency between the two is not considered. The term “document” is used as a nonspecific general concept that does not have a sectorial definition, but differs from the notions of documents in other areas of information exchange and museum documentation systems. The documentary essence of museum object is to this day determined by the ability to reflect reality through a set of properties that have semantic, axiological and communicative aspects. These provisions form an empirical basis for the theory of museum object in the structure of museum institution that helps to deve­lop the technology and practice of wor­king with scienti­fic collections. The problem of museum docu­ment ontology requires at this level neither formulation nor solution.

Before the theory of any science, including museo­logy, at the post-non-classical stage of development, prognostic problems are posed. Therefore, theoretical generalizations and terminological abstractions have great significance for knowledge of the science’s subject. The article examines the expediency of introducing into the conceptual apparatus of museology the term “museological document” as an abstract concept of a unit in the museum documentation process. Based on the theory of document and the pro­perties of the metasystem of documentary communications, its working definition is given. The importance of the new term for maintaining the theoretical connections of the science is emphasized, which allows to preserve the traditional adherence to the “museum object” in the legislative, normative and daily practice of the museum industry. Further research in this direction requires addressing to the methodology of culturological approach, since the museum is an institution that marks the document status of a real-world object, and the recognition and “reading” of a document is carried out within certain cultural norms.

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