MIT educates. MIT researches. MIT innovates. And MIT collects.

MIT embarked on an unusual project in 1971: to create a one-of-a-kind artifact collection that documents the work and life of the Institute. Today, the MIT Museum Collection has more than 1.5 million items, from the sublime to the silly. They tell remarkable, challenging stories about science, technology, art, and education in the modern world.

The museum’s mission is bigger than preservation. Our goal for the Collection has always been to be useful to the current endeavors of the MIT community: to aid the effort to generate and disseminate new knowledge and make a better world. Now we want to share the MIT Collection with you.

This gallery is both a treasure house and a tool. Through regularly changing exhibits, a workshop, and programs, we aspire to make the MIT Collection more fully accessible. The displays are introductions to artifacts and ideas intended to stimulate your imagination. They also tell stories about the Collection: how we acquire, care for, and display objects.

We also hope to encourage your creativity: to make it easier for you to discover and engage with the Collection for education, research, commerce, entertainment, aesthetic appreciation, or whatever purpose you might have. Help us make this an object-centered, knowledge-seeking gallery, a place of infinite new ideas and insight.

Unless otherwise noted, all artifacts and images on display in this gallery are from the MIT Museum Collection.