Placing Museum collection in contex:Historical collection and their contemporary cultural and social relevance.

The paper provides a critical reflection of the agency
involved in collecting practice of museums and in shaping
meaningful entities that were visualized in the past, and how
they work today. Museums’ relation to the past, which is a
key part of the process how they convey the image of past to
the audience, i.e. how they present their own view of
history, covers the questions which history is preserved,
what narratives are constructed in the museum mechanism,
how they are transmitted and who they refer to. If we take
the view that museum collections are created in specific
socio-historical contexts, and in considering the agencies
that shape them, we are to necessarily consider the processes
generating those contexts in order to grasp the nature of the
practice, then, we have to acknowledge that the practice
itself may have a profound influence on shaping that very
context. Highlighting the notion of museum collections as
loci of encounter and negotiation between museum and
society, the paper provides insights into the paradigm shifts
of museum collecting in Macedonia and into its responses to
specific social demands from 1945 to the present.
Examining current strategies for bringing historical
collections to the public and how museums handle the
challenges of contextualizing them in today’s institutional
program, particularly in terms of identity and memory, the
paper proposes that if museums are considered as critical
instruments of fundamental social change, then providing
important public influence can only emerge from a clear
vision of their future course, which means that research into
contemporary cultural and social relevance of historical
collections must occur in the intellectual framework of the
museum and its objectives in society.