Museum Collections and Material Culture Studies: Fifty Years of Minpaku

Keywords

Museum, Folk Implements , fieldwork

Objectives

In 2014, the National Museum of Ethnology launched the Info-Forum Museum (IFM) project, an initiative that could only be conducted by a research institution with museum facilities. The aim of the IFM project is to meticulously build a database so that researchers affiliated to the Museum can make social use of the materials in its collection. The project received high acclaim at the end of the Third Medium-term Plan of the Inter-University Research Institute Corporation.
However, since the researchers involved in the initial collection of materials have already retired from the front line, the status of many of the materials at the time they were collected is about to be forgotten. The application representative has also taken part in the IFM, but partly because there were so many materials to deal with, he was unable to confirm the collection status of each material.
The purpose of this research project is to reevaluate from a contemporary perspective the academic value of the museum staff’s material collecting activities, focusing on materials that have been almost completely neglected, such as the material collection cards used at the initial stage of forming the collection. In addition, collection activities at the National Museum’s predecessors the Hoya Museum and Attic Museum will be investigated.