To browse Academia. This paper explores the national law and policy concerning university museums, focusing specifically on the University Museums of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. It discusses the historical context and evolution of university museums, their relationship with cultural preservation, and the importance of university heritage in the realms of research, teaching, and community engagement.
The study emphasizes the need for universities to actively manage and promote their heritage, suggesting that doing so fosters a more substantial dialogue between past and present, and enhances the educational mission of universities. Mouliou, S. Soubiran, S. Talas and R. Wittje eds. In this paper I talk about two very different museums in Athens, the exhibits in the metro stations and the new Akropoli museum. I will begin with giving a general background to the metro stations.
I will then move on to some individual stations giving a little background and some information on the exhibits shown in each. The last station to be discussed is the Akropoli station which will bring us to the new Akropoli Museum. It is widely accepted that museums comprise centers for the conservation, study and reflection on culture and heritage.
In the Museum context, objects are presented to visitors, not simply as artifacts, but as objects embedded in cultural significance. If one of museums' main tasks consists in the contextualization of objects in their cultural meanings, past and present, museums may be cast anew, theoretically, as spaces not simply responsible for the preservation of artifacts, but as spaces of education as well. In the museum space, visitors, according to their own cognitive capacities and skills, and their educational backgrounds, approach such meanings mentally.
University Museums form a peculiar case of museums as they provide laboratories for the training of students. It follows that, a University Museum concerned with the history of education, as it is oriented towards preserving the cultural inheritance related to education, can easily provide material for both study and research purposes to many undergraduate or postgraduate university students.
