Catalogue description Science Museum: General Files

The Science Museum had its origins in the South Kensington Museum. The science collections were physically separated and removed to buildings on the present site in 1864, but were not administratively separated until 1909 with the formal establishment and naming of the Science Museum. In January 1913 an Advisory Council for the Science Museum was set up to advise the Board of Education on museum policy. In 1912 it had been decided to rebuild the museum in three blocks, but war and successive financial crises intervened so that it was not until 1928 that the first of the planned blocks was opened. Further rebuilding followed bomb damage sustained during the Second World War.

The museum serves as the National Museum of Science and Industry and incorporates the Science Museum Library, the National Railway Museum, York, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, at Bradford, and the Wellcome Museum of the History of Medicine. Until the 1980s it was organised in the following departments: Physics; Pure Chemistry; Electrical Engineering and Communications; Air, land and water transport and space science; Mechanical and Civil Engineering; Astronomy, Mathematics and Earth Sciences; Library; National Railway Museum; Wellcome Museum; and Museum Services (including workshops, design office, photographic studio, lecture service, external relations, publications etc.).

The museum also organises circulating exhibitions and has special exhibition galleries, one used exclusively for the display of recent acquisitions. The Science Museum library is open to the public and holds a stock of about 500,000 volumes, plus 19,000 sets of periodicals including 5,400 current sets. It aims at complete coverage of the literature of the history of science, technology and medicine. It also contains the Pictorial Collection, formed from various departments' holdings and including paintings, prints and drawings. There are also special collections of archive and unpublished materials.

Since the National Heritage Act 1983 came into force the museum has been managed by a board of trustees in which property in the collections is vested.