New initiatives in The Netherlands Open Air Museum: How an early open air museum keeps up with the times

The Netherlands Open Air Museum in Arnhem is one of the oldest open air museums of Europe. From the 1990s the staff has been engaged in an intense process of fundamentally changing the museum. The major step was to redefine the museum’s institutional identity. We believed that a good museum not only needs a firm scholarly basis, but a self-conscious museology as well. This museology we call ‘inclusive’, because it includes much more than a traditional museum. It includes popular culture, social struggle, ‘other-peoples” history, contemporary history. In all the new projects we wanted the visitors to share their memories and experiences with each other — and with us. The turnaround of The Netherlands Open Air Museum proved to be a success. Not only had the number of visitors grown from 280 000 a year in the 1980s to more than 450 000 from 2007 onwards. In 2005 The Netherlands Open Air Museum received the European Museum of the Year award