MIT Museum

The MIT Museum invites you to explore invention, ideas, and innovation. Through interactive exhibitions, public programs, experimental projects, and its renown collections, the MIT Museum showcases the fascinating world of MIT, and inspires people of all ages about the possibilities and opportunities offered by science and technology. This intimate museum, given one of the 2007 Boston Globe "Best of the New" awards for the Museum's recent expansion, annually attracts 90,000 visitors from around the world. The mission of the MIT Museum is to engage the wider community with MIT's science, technology, and other areas of scholarship in ways that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The MIT Museum fulfills this mission by: collecting and preserving artifacts that are significant in the life of MIT; creating exhibits and programs that are firmly rooted in MIT's areas of endeavor; engaging MIT faculty, staff and students with the wider community. The Museum is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting materials that serve as a resource for the study and interpretation of the intellectual, educational, and social history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its role in the development of modern science and technology. The Museum stands alone among university museums in its focus on the impact on society of the research, the teaching and the scientific innovations of its parent institution. Founded in 1971 as the MIT Historical Collections by Warren Seamans, the MIT Museum's original mandate was the collection and preservation of historical artifacts then scattered throughout MIT. Renamed MIT Museum in 1980 by the MIT Corporation Executive Committee, it began to develop exhibits and educational programs based on the Museum's MIT focused collections. The Museum was designed to meet the needs and interests of the MIT community as well as society at large.

http://web.mit.edu/museum/