Industrial Open-Air Museums in Poland – Adaptation to the Expectations and Requirements of a Modern Audience

The subject of open-air museums has been and continues to be extensively researched in Poland. The world’s first open-air museum called ‘Skansen’ was established in 1891 on the Stockholm island of Djurgården. The oldest open-air museum in Poland, the Teodora and Izydor Gulgowski Kashubian Ethnographic Park in Wdzydze Kiszewskie, was founded in 1906. Initially, open-air museums presented exclusively heritage facilities related to rural culture. Gradually, the exhibitions were supplemented with examples of small-town, worker, manor and industrial buildings. Over time, industrial open-air museums began to be established. Open-air museums can be divided into three categories. The first comprises displays of ethnographic items with the focus on folk culture. The second category comprises museums of technology and industry. In the third group there are ethnographic museums with separate sections of industrial exhibitions as well as museums displaying industrial equipment and machinery against the background of ethnographic heritage facilities. The aim of this treatise is to present the diversity of Polish open-air industrial museums, classify them, present their activities, evaluate them and discuss the conditions to be met so that open-air industrial museums can be recognised as a tourist product. Polish museums of technology and industry in the open air or with industrial outdoor exhibitions can be divided into museums related to sailing, shipbuilding and fishing, military, aviation, railway, firefighting, road building, beekeeping and mining, and others. The financial standing of outdoor museums of technology and industry varies, but is usually bad. In order to make open-air museums profitable it is necessary to modernise their offer. Since the traditional, static model of presenting museum resources is the least attractive nowadays, it is necessary to shift away from passive displays towards active dissemination.