Museum Documentation

Museum documentation is the activity of recording and generating diverse knowledge and evidence, in analogue and digital formats, in order to preserve the history of society and nature as reflected by museum collections. It is a fundamental strategic, operational, and transdisciplinary activity that enables the social role of museums as public memory institutions.
As a dynamic information resource, it is central to the fulfillment of this mission by:

• Reflecting and underpinning museum activities such as research, interpretation, collections management, audience engagement, conservation, curation, exhibition, education, administration and legal oversight, and security.
• Organizing and interconnecting information about physical, digital, and intangible collections around multidimensional aspects such as identity, materiality, preservation, aesthetics, conceptual associations, and social and historical contexts.
• Providing a living resource that evolves and responds to new knowledge that is supported by evidence, such as collection history and provenance.
• Acting as a conduit for promoting meaningful, ongoing collaboration among different communities to participate in the creation of diverse and inclusive knowledge.

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About the Definition

The Statement of Principles of Museum Documentation was published in 2012 by the Documentation Standards Working Group, a working group of the ICOM International Committee for Documentation, as a guide for museum collections staff. Since that publication, the world has consistently undergone significant social and technological change. These changes have been apparent in debates regarding the role of museums in representing the history and cultures of their collections and communities, and thereby influencing attitudes toward the practice of documentation in museums.

In May 2023, the ICOM Documentation board launched the Museum Documentation Definition task force to develop a definition for ‘museum documentation’ that attempts to succinctly represent the nature of those changes, and encapsulate the scope, boundaries, and applications of documentation activities in museums today.

Through this process, several universal aspects of how museum documentation is practiced today rose to the surface. Thus, the museum documentation referred to in this article is one that can be applied to the most quintessential and wide-ranging activities of a museum, yet also one that is flexible enough to be useful to those in the most specialized or transdisciplinary fields – whether in the humanities, or social or physical sciences. While collection management is the core museum activity where documentation is mandatory, the definition of museum documentation must accommodate all activities of the museum where documentation is key to research, accessibility, strategy, community engagement, and the ongoing generation of new knowledge. If a museum’s collection is not adequately documented, it cannot be a true representation of culture and society, or broadly accessed, narrowing the museum’s overall role as a memory institution.

Draft V (D.V) of the “Museum Documentation” definition was formally approved by the ICOM Doc board as Version 1 (V.1) on 30 July 2026 and officially published and disseminated in September 2026.

Version History

Version 1 (V.1) – approved 30 July 2026