Международный совет музеев: история и деятельность

Organization of museums and museum professionals founded in 1946

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) is a non governmental organisation dedicated to museums, maintaining formal relations with UNESCO and having a consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Founded in 1946, ICOM also partners with entities such as the World Intellectual Property Organization, Interpol, and the World Customs Organization in order to carry out its international public service missions, which include fighting illicit traffic in cultural goods and promoting risk management and emergency preparedness to protect world cultural heritage in the event of natural or man made disasters. Members of the ICOM get the ICOM membership card, which provides free entry, or entry at a reduced rate, to many museums all over the world.

ICOM traces it roots back to the defunct International Museums Office (OIM (Office internalional des musées)), created in 1926 by the League of Nations. An agency of the League's International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation, like many of the League's initiatives the OIM was dissolved following WWII, and its activities later assumed by ICOM.

ICOM adopted its ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums in 1986, a reference tool that sets standards of excellence to which all members of the organisation must adhere. The ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, translated into 39 languages and revised in 2004, establishes values and principles shared by ICOM and the international museum community. These standards of self regulation by museums include basic principles for museum governance, the acquisition and disposal of collections, and rules for professional conduct. A decision was reached in 2019 following the 25th General Conference of ICOM that the Code should be reviewed and revised if necessary. The review process is ongoing and is coordinated by the ICOM Standing Committee for Ethics (ETHCOM), a dedicated ICOM body which handles ethical issues relating to museums.

ICOM is committed to providing cultural institutions with the necessary support and risk prevention tools when faced with conflict situations or natural disasters. Through its Disaster Relief for Museums Task Force (DRTF), its Museums Emergency Programme (MEP) and its active role in the Blue Shield, ICOM assists museums worldwide by mobilising its resources quickly and efficiently to provide support in both the prevention and the aftermath of disaster situations. The Getty Conservation Institute and ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) took part in this programme and helped develop training tools for MEP. ICOM's action programme offers a long term global response that strengthens the Blue Shield dynamism.

Every year since 1977, ICOM has organised International Museum Day, a worldwide event held around 18 May. From America and Oceania to Europe, Asia and Africa, International Museum Day aims to increase public awareness of the role of museums in developing society.

The ICOM General Conference is held every three years and gathers museum professionals from several countries. The first meeting was held in Paris in 1948. In recent years, General Conferences have been held in Seoul in 2004 (the first meeting in Asia), in Vienna in 2007, and in Shanghai in 2010. This 22nd General Conference in Shanghai followed the World Expo where the ICOM's Pavilion was inaugurated and named "Museums, Heart of the City". The General Conference was held in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, in Milan in 2016, in Kyoto in 2019, in Prague in 2022. Dubai is to welcome the 27th ICOM General Conference dedicated to "The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities" in 2025.

The current ICOM President is Ms. Emma Nardi. She succeeded Mr. Alberto Garlandini. The current Director General is Medea Ekner, who replaced Peter Keller. Previous Directors General were Anne Catherine Robert Hauglustaine (2014–2016) and Hanna Pennock (2013–2014).

No. PeriodNameCountry 1 1946–1953 Chauncey Hamlin 2 1953–1959 Georges Salles 3 1959–1965 Philip Hendy 4 1965–1971 Arthur van Schendel 5 1971–1977 Jan Jelínek 6 1977–1983 Hubert Landais 7 1983–1989 Geoffrey Lewis 8 1989–1992 Alpha Oumar Konaré 9 1992–1998 Saroj Ghose 10 1998–2004 Jacques Perot 11 2004–2010 Alissandra Cummins 12 2010–2016 Hans Martin Hinz 13 2016–2020 Suay Aksoy 14 2020–2022 Alberto Garlandini 15 2022– Emma Nardi

CIDOC, ICOM's International Committee for Documentation, provides the museum community with standards and advice on museum documentation. The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), formalised as the official international standard ISO 21127, is used to map cultural heritage information to a common and extensible semantic framework. This "semantic glue" can be used to connect between different sources of cultural heritage information published by museums, libraries and archives. The committee was founded by Ivan Illich in 1961 in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

ICOM was the first international organization to participate in the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) online museums directory in the 1990s. It was also instrumental in the creation of the ". museum" top level domain (TLD) for museums online through the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma).

The International Association of Transport and Communication Museums (IATM) is a world wide membership organisation of museums which collect, interpret and make public material and information about transport and/or communication.