On the question of museum sources and sources

The article deals with the problem of expressiveness, attractiveness and information content of a material source, as a historical and specifically museum type of source, based on numerous opinions of specialists and practice. The views of historians, source experts, museum workers and teachers of museum departments on the museum object as a specific historical source with a wide range of properties are analyzed. It is argued that attractiveness and expressiveness are not always indispensable properties of a museum object. The main attention is paid to the principle of informativeness of a museum object and its semantics. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the object as such does not carry «internal» information, i. e. it is not a historical source, and, consequently, the existence of museum source studies as a scientific direction and academic discipline is called into question.