Why visit a museum?

CEBU, Philippines - There's quite a buzz about museums in Cebu City. Every year, for several years now, museums in the city and neighboring areas collaborate to hold the "Gabii sa Kabilin" (Night of Heritage), a whole night of visits to close to 40 museums. The event has been gaining ground with the public, as evidenced by the growing number of participants each time.

What is it about museums that make it click with people? The website www.telegraph.co.uk cites a number of reasons, including: 

• Museums get everyone engaged with history. Face-to-face encounters with artifacts at museums definitely provide a much closer experience of history than simply reading about it from a page of a book.

• Museums hold special events that are both informative and fun. It is a practice among museums to hold lectures and workshops related to an ongoing special exhibit, for example. Participants get to learn more about the subject of the special exhibit or get involved in the activities for an actual experience.

• It's quite amazing how one gets a different experience at each visit to a museum, even the same museum he or she had already visited before. There's always something that one discovers at each visit that had escaped his or her attention before. Also, there are new pieces on exhibit since museums are continually upgrading their displays.

• Local museums provide a community with pride of place and a repository of its collective heritage. For the locals themselves, museums are an effective way of imbibing local history.

• Museums have good tourism prospects. Many people would travel great distances just to be able to visit good museums. Conversely, a good local museum has the potential of drawing in tourists.

• Museums provide a peek to the future. Museums not only present the past to an audience today, but look forward to the way they will work in the future. In the first place, what is the future but a continuation of past and present?

It's true: Museums bring history to life. And so the lessons of the past become useful in the present - and previous mistakes may not be repeated. (FREEMAN)