Museums, as we know them today, have their origins in the 18th and 19th centuries, when they came to dominance for showcasing the wonders of British imperialism. Since this period their function and symbolism has gradually changed and they, together with libraries and galleries, are important repositories for cultural knowledge.

The University of Nottingham itself has many of its own collections, including the Natural History Collection (curated by the School of Biology) and the Archaeology Museum as well as the galleries down at the Lakeside Arts Centre and the Manuscripts and Special Collections, to which we will return later.

Above text sourced from OpenLearn under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/the-rise-museums
 

Above images by Tom Hartman, School of Biology, University of Nottingham