ABSTRACT
The collecting of objects by industrial museums for establishing a material memory remains an open process which, under specific conditions, ventures in new directions. At the end of the 1970s, the Landschaftsverbnde Westfalen-Lippe (LWL) and Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR), regional authorities in Westphalia and the Rhineland in Germany, founded a series of industrial museums at authentic industrial sites. In the 1980s and early 1990s the Industriekultur movement no longer limited itself to industrial museums but developed into a tourist movement. As well as maintaining valuable monuments, projects included urban planning and landscaping, followed by the integration of industrial areas with all their ecological, economical and social developments. Early industrial museums such as the Deutsche Bergbaumuseum in Bochum were strongly influenced by the technical historical roots from which they originated. In museums of this type, the engineers' perspective' or a technology-oriented focus on industrial history had an enduring impact on their collections.
