HANNOVER: Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover—Lower Saxony State Museum Hannover

Abstract

Soon after having been founded as a reading society in 1797, the “Naturhistorische Gesellschaft Hannover” started collecting natural objects. From 1850 on, these activities became increasingly systematic and gradually lead to the establishment of a “museal” natural history department. After changing place several times during the nineteenth century, natural history finally moved into a representative building near the city of Hannover in 1902, where its exhibitions are situated until today together with the departments archaeology and ethnology and the art gallery plus numismatics, thus building up a compound museum.

Around the millennium, the growing collections of three departments had to be moved step by step to a former factory building at the western margin of Hannover, starting in 1997. Since 2002, the geoscience collections are housed there, apart from the exhibitions of the main building.

In 1995, the regular acquisition budget was cancelled by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture. Thus, todays collections‘increment bases mainly on donations from private collectors and sporadic Ministry support for very special cases.