Alele Museum & Public Library is the national museum and the national archive of the

Marshall Islands The Marshall Islands, officially the Republic of the Marshall Islands, is an island country west of the International Date Line and north of the equator in the Micronesia region of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. The territory consists of 29 c ...

. It also hosts the only

public library A public library is a library, most often a lending library, that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also Civil servic ...

in the country.

Background

The idea of a museum for the Marshall Islands was first developed in 1968 with the Marshall Islands Museum Committee meeting initially of 8 February that year. On 25 March 1970, a charter was incorporated for a Marshall Islands Museum. It was decided that the museum and library would share a purpose-built premises and the building was completed in 1974. As of 2020, the organisation had ten staff. The ''alele'' means bag or basket in Marshallese, and represents a particular receptacle in which a family's valuables would have traditionally been kept.

Museum

The museum opened in 1981 and has been in continuous operation since then, apart from between 2011 and 2013. The museum is on the ground floor of the building and has exhibits across three rooms. Displays focus on Marshallese culture, including traditional navigation, warfare, tools, crafts and jewellery. Due to a lack of space, the museum is unable to display the large items from its textile collection, in particular its which are traditional women's cloths. The museum also organisations the Manit Day celebrations, which encourages the celebration of Marshallese culture. A major aspect of the museum's public engagement work is its regular radio program which has been running since the 1980s and connects people in the outer islands in particular to the work of the museum.

Collections and research

The museum's collection includes traditional tools, objects relating to housing, jewellery, drums, fishing apparatus, tattooing, weaving, canoes (and model canoes), and navigation, including stick charts, a Marshallese nautical tool used to memorise wave patterns. The museum has been active in collecting and recording traditional Marshallese crafts. The museum has collaborated to understand and create listings for Marshallese intangible heritage, in particular work on indigenous navigation. The museum is part of an international collaboration building a digital archive of nuclear history relating to the country. In 2004 the museum led a new research project investigating Marshallese traditional medicine.

Overseas collections

In part, due to legacies of colonialism, many overseas institutions hold collections of Marshallese material culture, including:

Penn Museum The Penn Museum is an archaeology and anthropology museum at the University of Pennsylvania. It is located on Penn's campus in the University City, Philadelphia, University City neighborhood of Philadelphia, at the intersection of 33rd and Sout ...

;

Burke Museum The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (commonly as Burke Museum) is a natural history museum on the campus of the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington (state), Washington, United States. It is administered by the University ...

; Te Papa; the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

;

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

, amongst others.

Gallery of objects held in overseas collections

File:National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka - Fish trap - Marshall Islands - Collected in 1942.jpg, Fish trap, collected 1942 (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka) File:Necklace, sperm whale teeth, glass beads, spondylus disks, plant fiber, Marshall Islands, 1891 - Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde München - DSC08298.JPG, Necklace: sperm whale teeth, glass beads, spondylus disks, plant fiber, Marshall Islands, 1891 (Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde München) File:Adzes, Marshall and Yap Islands - Pacific collection - Peabody Museum, Harvard University - DSC05732.JPG, Adzes, Marshall and Yap Islands ( Peabody Museum) File:Carrying basket for water containers of coconut shell, Marshall Islands, 1895 - Ethnological Museum, Berlin - DSC01163.JPG, Carrying basket for water containers of coconut shell, Marshall Islands, 1895 - (Ethnological Museum, Berlin) File:Clothing mat, Marshall Islands - Ethnological Museum, Berlin - DSC01168.JPG, Clothing mat, Marshall Islands (Ethnological Museum, Berlin) File:Marshall and Gilbert Islands (IA marshallgilbert00long).pdf, Plants collectioned for the United States National Museum, with surplus herbarium material sent to Honolulu Museum File:Dress mat from Marshall Islands, Honolulu Museum of Art.JPG, Dress mat from Marshall Islands,

Honolulu Museum of Art The Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts) is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, Hawaii. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. It has one of the largest single co ...

File:Stick chart, Marshall Islands - Pacific collection - Peabody Museum, Harvard University - DSC05729.JPG, Stick chart, Marshall Islands - Pacific collection - Peabody Museum

Library

The library is located on the second floor of the building; it has a dedicated area for children's literature, as well as a Pacific section. The library has a strong research collection that focuses on the Marshall Islands. It also supports computer literacy, through learning programmes.

Former directors

* Gerald R. Knight * Melvin Majmeto * Wisse Amram * Bernice Joash

References

External links

Alele Museum-Library and National Archives in Majuro, Marshall Islands
*

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

Alele Museum
*Virtual Museum
Clothing Mats of the Marshall Islands

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Libraries in the Marshall Islands Museums in the Marshall Islands Libraries established in 1981