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Collection and Collection

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Collections and Collections

Collection usually designates a general set, with a broader body, often made up of several collections.

Collection means a cohesive body and is synonymous with the terms collection and compilation. Due to this necessary organicity to the collection, it follows criteria and norms of choice and internal organization. It can be made up of material or immaterial objects, be held by a single individual or belong to an organization, private or governmental, be secret or open to the public. As defined by Key Concepts in Museology, the items gathered in a collection must “form a (relatively) coherent and meaningful whole.

Source: https://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/termo14329/acervo-e-colecao#:~:text=Como%20define%20a%20publica%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20Conceitos,)%20coherente%20e %20significant%E2%80%9D2.&text=As%20cole%C3%A7%C3%B5es%20s%C3%A3o%20a%20soul,os%20objects%20that%20os%20comp%C3%B5em.

collection


Cultural goods, material or immaterial, movable or immovable, that make up the documental field of a given museum, which may or may not be registered with the institution. It is the set of objects/documents that correspond to the interest and objective of preservation, research and communication of a museum. As an example, any document attesting to the life and work of writer Guimarães Rosa is of interest to the Museu Casa Guimarães Rosa (MCGR)/Cordisburgo (MG), regardless of whether it is in its custody or not. They are a collection on which the Museum can operate objects and documentation about the writer, owned by individuals or other cultural institutions, as well as the urban structure and the landscape around the city of Cordisburgo, such as squares, buildings, old farms , geographic accidents, flora and fauna species and oral tradition of the region's population, which are crucial references in Guimarães Rosa's work. Although they are not cultural assets that make up the institutionalized collection, they have a documentary value of interest to the Museum, deserving a museological action that can take place not necessarily with their collection, but through their preservation in databases, inventories, musealization in loco etc.

Collection

In a descriptive definition, it is a set of natural and artificial objects, brought together by people or institutions, which have lost their use value, kept outside the economic circuit, subject to special protection in a place reserved for this purpose. But what, in fact, characterizes and distinguishes collection objects from other sets of objects is the function they share, of being semiophores, that is: of playing the role of representing certain realities or entities, constituting intermediaries between those who look, the spectators, and the unseen world – past, eternity, dead etc. - that represent. This function of the collections can be exemplified by the Geraldo Parreiras Collection, from the Mineiro Museum, which brings together objects of sacred art, mostly originating in Minas Gerais, in the 18th and 19th centuries. Giving concreteness and materiality to the past, this collection exposes the men of the present to objects that have the role of representing the mining society of the 18th century, marked by Catholic religiosity and baroque aesthetics.

Source:  (Subsidies for the Creation of Museums/Ministry of Culture - Brazilian Institute of Museums)

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