All too often, there is a difference between what we say and what we think we have said, and between how we feel we have handled people and how they think they have been treated. When such ‘gaps’ occur between the intent and the action, it is often stated that there has been ‘a breakdown in communication ’. Sometimes the breakdown is allowed to become so serious that the gap becomes a chasm, relatives in the family ceasing to speak to one another, management and trade unions refusing to meet, and government recalling ambassadors when relations between states reach a low ebb.

  In fact, sometimes when people communicate, either as individual or within groups, problems inevitably occur; instruction maybe impossible to carry out, offence is taken at a particular remark, a directive is ambiguously phrased or people’s attitudes are colored by jealousy, resentment or frustration.

  During the past fifty years, industrial, commercial and public service organizations have grown prodigiously to meet the needs of advanced technological societies. Sometimes as many as 10,000 people work on one site, or one company employs more than 50,000 people. Clearly, good communication is essential to the efficient operation of any organization and vital to the fulfilment of all those who commit their working lives to it.

  For this reason, management specialists and behavioural scientists have devoted much thought and energy over recent years to analyzing the problems caused by bad communication practices and creating good communication climate and systems.

  As a result of the current structure of societies and economies, most of us spend our working lives in an organization where we become good communicators with social skills.

  It may be argued that museums as an institution and an agency for transmitting cultural heritage are an artificial creature, so far as objects are removed from their natural or proper environments and put into museums which are a different environment altogether. However, it seems that museums themselves have come to be accepted and recognized as the best equipped institutions devised by man for the assemblage of cultural objects and their presentation and preservation for the present and future generations.

  The artificial character of museums is however being gradually transformed into a cultural reality. Thus, just as one goes to the theatre for plays and other performing arts; the mosque, the church or the shrine for worship; the library for the printed word; today, it is to the museums one goes to see evidence of man’s material outfit. For, no other institution or place so readily comes to mind as museums do when evidence of material culture is sought. Herein lies the importance of museums as cultural institutions and an agency for transmitting culture.