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The museums participating in the survey reported a total of 111,633,603 visits in 2019. This is almost as many as were recorded in 2018 (-0.03%). Apart from the record year of 2017, the number of reported visits has thus remained roughly the same since 2016. Of the 6,834 museums contacted, 4,972 institutions took part in the survey; 4,543 (66.5%) museums reported their visit figures for 2019 to the Institute for Museum Research at the National Museums in Berlin.

The Director of the Institute for Museum Research, Dr Patricia Rahemipour, states: "The annual overall statistics are an important basis for our application-oriented research with and about museums. In addition, it provides important comparative data, especially against the background of the current situation, in order to be able to assess the effects of the crisis."

Despite a slight decline, the trend towards special exhibitions continued unabated: A total of 8,255 special exhibitions were reported, with an average of three per museum. More than every second German museum (53.8%) that took part in the survey organised at least one special exhibition in 2019. The fact that the activity of the exhibiting museums continued unabated in the 2019 survey year was certainly also due to the numerous anniversaries that were celebrated in 2019: from the Bauhaus to the epoch years 1919/1969/1989 to the commemoration of Humboldt, Fontane and many others.

The separately surveyed visitor numbers and exhibitions in the exhibition centres were down slightly compared to 2018. The exhibition centres participating in the survey reported a total of 5,428,460 visits (-4%) and 1,729 exhibitions (-11%) for 2019. 505 exhibition centres were contacted, 362 participated in the survey and 335 (66.3%) reported visit figures.

Prof Dr Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, explains: "The visitor figures for 2019 show the continuing popularity of museums. Against the backdrop of the current crisis, this is an important finding, as it impressively emphasises the social importance of museums and their activities."
Prof. Dr Eckart Köhne, President of the German Museums Association, emphasises: "The current survey makes an important empirical contribution to the role of museums as guardians of the cultural memory of future generations, which has received less attention in the public debate. Especially in times of the pandemic, which is affecting the very existence of many museums in Germany, this data provides impressive evidence of the relevance of museums and their collection treasures for the society of the future."

Special question on the Global Goals for Sustainable Development

Many stakeholders in society, business and politics are now using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to strategically align their actions and planning. For the majority of museums (55.5%), they played no or only a minor role or were unknown in 2019.

Guardians of at least 406 million objects

In addition to the annual survey of visitor and exhibition data, the Institute for Museum Research also collected basic data on the collections held by museums in Germany in 2019, the resources tied up in them and the museums' strategic handling of their collections. A good third of the museums contacted (35.3%) provided information on their collections. According to the information provided by the responding museums, the number of objects they kept in 2019 totalled at least 406,212,006 objects. Regardless of the type of museum, one in three (32.9%) had fewer than 1,000 objects, while a third of museums (31%) held more than 10,000 objects and only just over one in ten (13.5%) had a collection of more than 50,000 objects.

On average, around 60% of a museum's holdings were inventoried. One in five museums made their collections available online to external users, with two thirds of this group limiting online availability to a maximum of 10% of the total collection. Calculated on the basis of all the reporting museums, an average of 24 hours a week was invested in the care of the collections, an average of 548 m² of storage space was used and around 4 per cent of the total budget was spent on the preservation, cataloguing and research of the collections. One third (36.2%) of the museums had an acquisition budget.

The relevance of collection concepts for strategic planning was rated rather low overall by the museums (average relevance score of 2.27 on a scale of 0 to 5). Only a third of museums (35%) stated that they worked with a written collection concept, while just under one in five institutions (18%) had such a concept in the pipeline.
Further information and data on the German museum landscape in 2019 can be found in the publication "Statistische Gesamterhebung an den Museen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für das Jahr 2019", which contains information on the individual federal states in addition to the presentation of museum visits by museum type.
The publication appears in the series "Zahlen & Materialien aus dem Institut für Museumsforschung" (formerly "Materialien aus dem Institut für Museumsforschung"), issue 75 (2021) and will be available for download at www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrichtungen/institut-fuer-museumsforschung/home.html from the end of January.

Further enquiries about the publication can be addressed to
Institute for Museum Research - National Museums in Berlin
In der Halde 1, 14195 Berlin
Tel. 030/8301-460
Mail: ifm@smb.spk-berlin.de