What is a museum? It is that tedious and boring place where we are told to admire a "fantastic" collection that most of the time we don't even understand what we are looking at. Wow, how interesting! It is a place where our teachers, our parents or our companions bring us to acknowledge, when all we would want is something totally different, like a football match on television. This is a common thought among people, among the non scholars, because museums in the past have been dead places.
Fortunately museums have come to understand, in the last 10 years or so, that having a great collection was not "that big of a deal" to attract the public. People wanted something more thrilling and more comprehensive with which to understand the great collections. It is obvious that a museum will always have at its center the collection. What they are trying to do now is to become the center of knowledge and culture, by using all means; adding laboratories along with new technologies, making exciting events and so on.