Museum Fact File

First museum open to the public: Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy, 1591
First museum in England: The Ashnolean Museum, Oxford, opened in 1683 to display the collection of natural history exhibits, coins, weapons and other items belonging to the collector and antiquary Elias Ashmole (1617-92)
The First National Museum: British Museum, London, opened to the public in1759.
First public museum in the USA: Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, opened 1773.
First open-air museum: Skansen, Stockholm, Sweden, opened in 1891.
First children's museum: Brooklyn, New York, USA, opened 1899 and was the first of more than 300 children's museums worldwide.
First interactive museum: The Exploratorium, sna Fransisco, California, USA, opened in 1969 and has hundreds of hand-on exhibits.
Largest museum complex:The Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA, consists of 16 museums with a total of more than 140 million items in their collections

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