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Towards the Definition of New Criteria for and Approaches toCollecting of Items for Museum Collections
Zvjezdana Antoš, Zagreb/ Kroatien
Documenting and researching of everyday life and contempo-rary culture are extraordinary important factors in today's activitiesof ethnographic museums and therefore a frequent subject of inter-national conferences of ethnographic museums'. Ethnographic muse-ums have different approaches to collecting, which is the cause ofinitiative of contemporary museological and ethnological practice forcreating the new criteria for and approaches to collecting of items formuseum collections. The museums work and act in an atmosphere ofnever ending questioning and discussions about the items from eve-ryday life, which should be collected, and according to which crite-ria².
The aim of this paper is to give a critical review of the col-lecting practice of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb so far and totry to discuss the items of today's global mass production that shouldbe collected for museum collections.
Review of collecting the materials in the Ethnographic Museum inZagreb
The collections of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb havebeen created before the museum was even founded, for the most partdue to Salomon Berger, who was the collector of the textile materialsand the admirer of ethnographic heritage, and later also the founderof the Ethnographic Museum. At the very founding of the Ethno-graphic Museum in Zagreb, the mainly private collections that wereobtained earlier and singled out from the inventory of the SchoolMuseum and the Museum for Arts and Crafts, have been included in
1 There was a workshop on the NET( European network of ethnographical and social history museums) conferencein 1999 in Namur, dealing with documenting everyday life.
2 The criteria of the Swedish SAMDOK( international standard for documenting of the present) were established
already in 1977. With certain modifications, they are valuable for collecting in general, because each collecting isbeing conducted in the present time.