Today capacities of the museum as a center of ecological education are connected with the tasks which it performs relating to the society and culture. Changing cultural paradigm and identifying new activities relevant for human communities the activity of museum in favour of social, cultural and spiritual evolution also changes respectively.
Capacities of this activity are founded in museum’s mission:
“Museum is a specific scientific and cultural establishment which accumulates natural and social objects of the true value which are studied for scientific and cultural purposes.” Museum’s activity is designed for organization of integration, storage, studying and exhibiting items and their use for scientific, education and enlightenment purposes.
“Museum is an initiator of dedication to the secret of cognition as well as expression of a certain system of knowledge about the world and society, keeper of the national past, a “specific tool for storage and transfer of cultural information”. Conducting historical and cultural analysis of the museum as social and cultural phenomenon its following features concerning society are clearly manifested:
- documentation (or proof by the museum exhibit of different facts, events, phenomena which occurred in nature and society);
- education (or use of informative and expressive capacities of museum exhibits to satisfy educational and cultural demands of the society)
“Confined to borders of a certain location museum solves tasks which are not characteristic for other establishments:
1. … Museum is a center of a region’s scientific documentation. It is the museum which accumulates material evidence (documents) of development of history, culture and nature which are imparted with true (authentic) information having big scientific and cultural meaning when become museum exhibits.
2. Museum is one of the region’s research and scientific centers… shedding light on development of cultural or natural processes which occur in the “space of museum”.
3. Moreover, museum is an establishment of cultural representation of a region because the exhibited items are patterns of the cultural heritage. In its turn museum exposition is a new cultural reality …
4. Documentary, scientific and cultural value of museum allows to regard it as education center, process of transfer of cultural norms, the best traditions, experience of generations with account of those requirements which were posed by the society in different historical periods….”
We consider that these characteristics of museum activity and the meaning of “ecology” (greek oikos- “house, birthplace”) formulate capacities and, moreover, responsibilities of museum as the center of ecological education which is undoubtedly encouraged by development of museumology and interdisciplinary knowledge. Establishment of ecological concept, noospheric ideas reaffirm the growing capacities and value of museum in tackling burning issues of educational process and learning of ecological culture as its integral part.