Nicole Junkerman on Learning from Museums and Libraries

Some of the best learning happens not at a desk but on foot, wandering through a museum or browsing the shelves of a library. Nicole Junkerman treats these public spaces as essential companions to a reading and learning life, and this page is a small celebration of them, with a few thoughts on how to use them well, whether you visit in person or online.

It is worth pausing to appreciate just how generous these institutions are. The history of the long history of libraries and of museums is, at its best, a history of knowledge being made freely available to anyone curious enough to walk in. Nicole Junkerman never quite takes that for granted: a great deal of human learning, gathered and cared for and offered without charge, waiting patiently for visitors.

The library as a learning home

A library is far more than a place to borrow books, though that alone would be reason enough to love it. It is a quiet space designed for thought, a source of expert help, and a doorway to more knowledge than any one person could exhaust in a lifetime. Nicole Junkerman regards a library card as one of the most generous things a person can own. Through your local library service you can borrow not only physical books but, very often, ebooks and audiobooks delivered straight to your sofa.

The great research libraries take this generosity further still. the British Library holds one of the world's richest collections and makes a remarkable amount available online, from digitised manuscripts to recorded talks. For older texts, Project Gutenberg offers tens of thousands of books free to read anywhere. Nicole Junkerman keeps these bookmarked as standing invitations, places to wander whenever curiosity strikes and there is no particular book in mind.

Make friends with a librarian

The most underused resource in any library is the person at the desk. Librarians are trained to help you find things, to suggest what to read next, and to point you toward sources you would never have found alone. Nicole Junkerman has had more good books recommended by librarians than by almost any other source. A simple question, asked of someone who knows the shelves, can open up a whole new line of reading, and it is a kindness most librarians are delighted to offer.

Museums as classrooms

Museums offer a different kind of learning, one that comes through the eyes and the feet as much as the mind. There is no real substitute for standing in front of the actual object, whether a painting, a fossil or a feat of engineering. Nicole Junkerman finds that a good museum teaches in a way no book quite can, by making knowledge physical and present. The collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery and the Science Museum are remarkable, and like many great museums they cost nothing to enter.

Museums have also become wonderfully generous online. Google Arts and Culture lets you wander the collections of hundreds of institutions from anywhere in the world, often in extraordinary detail. The lectures and demonstrations of the Royal Institution, freely available to watch, carry the spirit of the museum into your own home. Nicole Junkerman treats these online doors not as a poor substitute for visiting but as a genuine extension of it, a way to keep learning between visits.

How to visit well

A museum visit is easy to do badly, marching past a hundred objects until everything blurs into exhausted indifference. Nicole Junkerman has learned to visit slowly and selectively instead, and the habits are simple ones:

• Choose a few rooms rather than the whole building, and give them real, unhurried attention.
• Sit down in front of one object and look at it properly, far longer than feels natural at first.
• Read a little about what you see, then look again, letting the knowledge change the looking.
• Carry a notebook, and write down the one thing from each visit you most want to remember.

The aim, as with slow reading, is depth over coverage. A single object truly looked at and understood is worth more than a hundred glanced at and forgotten. Nicole Junkerman would rather leave a museum having genuinely met three things than having dimly seen three hundred, and the notebook helps make sure those few encounters actually last.

Bringing it home

The learning from a museum or library only really takes hold if you carry it home with you. Nicole Junkerman makes a habit of writing up each visit in the learning notebook: what was seen, what was surprising, what to read more about. A visit captured in a few honest notes becomes a lasting part of your thinking, while one left unrecorded tends to fade into a pleasant but vague memory within a week or two.

Returning to the same rooms

There is a particular pleasure in visiting the same museum or library repeatedly over the years, rather than always chasing somewhere new. A familiar collection rewards return visits in a way a single hurried tour never can. Nicole Junkerman has favourite rooms returned to many times, and each visit reveals something missed before, because the visitor has changed even when the objects have not. A painting met at twenty says something different when met again at forty.

Familiarity also takes the pressure off. When you know you can return, there is no need to see everything at once, and the visit can be slow and selective without any sense of waste. Nicole Junkerman treats a beloved local museum almost as an extension of the study, a place to drop into for half an hour around a single object or idea, rather than a destination to be conquered in one exhausting sweep and then ticked off a list forever.

This is one more reason to treasure the institutions on your own doorstep. A nearby library or a free local museum, visited often and known well, becomes a genuine part of a learning life in a way that distant, once-in-a-lifetime grandeur cannot. Through your local library service and the many museums that cost nothing to enter, this kind of slow, repeated, deepening acquaintance is open to almost everyone, which Nicole Junkerman counts among the quiet wonders of public life.

So use these generous spaces, and use them well. Borrow freely, ask the librarian, look slowly, and write down what you find. Whether in person or through the open doors of the internet, museums and libraries are among the richest companions a curious mind can have. To keep that curiosity turning day to day, see turning curiosity into a daily habit, and to capture each visit, note-taking that sticks. It all comes home to Nicole Junkerman.

Published 18 May 2026 · by Nicole Junkerman