Clifton Museum - A small Museum in a Small Town

The Clifton Historical Museum is a worthy tribute to the district's pioneering past. Housed in the old butter factory, you can take a step back in time and visit a 1930s dining room, a pioneer bedroom, an early hospital ward, kitchen and children's room.

The Heritage room allows access to original records of local businesses and schools. Read the memoirs of long-time residents, browse through the photographic collection, or look for your forebears on the database.An extensive range of early agricultural tools and machinery will evoke memories of yesteryear. Old movie memorabilia, communication, history, musical pieces; there's something for everyone, discover it for yourself.

Clifton Museum - A small Museum in a Small Town

Museum Education

Museum education is a specialized field devoted to developing and strengthening museums' role as public institutions. The purpose of museum education is to enhance the visitors ability to understand and appreciate museum collections. In a seminal report called Excellence and Equity published by the American Association of Museums (1992), the educational role of museums was identified as the core to museums' service to the public.

According to the report, "...the public dimensions of museums leads them to perform the public service of education - a term that in its broadest sense includes exploration, study, observation, critical thinking, contemplation and dialogue." As museum education has developed as a field of study and interest in its own right, efforts have been made to record its history and to establish a research agenda to strengthen its position as a discipline in the wider work of museums.

What is a Museum?

A museum is an institution that cares for (conserves) a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities throughout the world and more local ones exist in smaller cities, towns and even the countryside.

The continuing acceleration in the digitization of information, combined with the increasing capacity of digital information storage, is causing the traditional model of museums (i.e. as static “collections of collections” of three-dimensional specimens and artifacts) to expand to include virtual exhibits and high-resolution images of their collections for perusal, study, and exploration from any place with Internet.