Research

Research at Forum Marinum particularly focuses on the history of merchant shipping and ship building in South-West Finland and of naval warfare and the Navy. The subjects of research are influenced by, among other things, the currently produced exhibitions.

The centre has carried out various projects aiming at the development of maritime museums and research. The Documentation Project of Finnish Museum Ships was a national development project carried out by the Finnish Maritime Museum and the Forum Marinum Foundation in 2008–2010. Its aim was to establish documentation principles and evaluation criteria for historically important ships, which will facilitate the study of the information on existing museum ships and the future evaluation of the need to preserve vessels, which are suggested to be turned into museum ships. The project was financed by the Ministry of Education and the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation.

In addition, Forum Marinum has participated in projects documenting ships currently in use; for example, contemporary documentation was carried out on the m/s Silja Europa in 2006 in collaboration with the Turku Provincial Museum, and in 2010 the cruise activities of the m/s Kristina Regina both on the Baltic and the Mediterranean were documented in collaboration with the Finnish Maritime Museum and the subject of Maritime History at the University of Helsinki.