During the twenty years of existence of the Department of Museum Work and Protection of Monuments of the Saint Petersburg State University, personnel of the Department acted as editors and authors of numerous collective and individual monographs, reference books, articles and other publications, problems of which concerned not only museum business, but also other areas of humanitarian knowledge: philosophy, axiology, aesthetics, psychology of perception, cultural studies, art history, curatorial theory. Among the key research areas of the Department's personnel are issues of heritage preservation, characteristics of cultural memory, problems of evaluating art in the museum context, actualization and interpretation of a museum object in the context of contemporary exhibition projects, problems of educational, communicative, mediation practices in a museum, the history of museological discipline. These areas of the Department's research are united by a philosophical and anthropological component, which over two decades of studies has developed into an original interdisciplinary concept. Two key aspects can be distinguished in the museological concept of the Department: the philosophy of the museum, and the understanding of the idea and activity of the museum in the context of cultural and social anthropology. Analyzing the problems of transformation of the museum idea over the past decades, the interaction of modern art and the classical museum, the real museum and the digital one, the narrative of museum and the narrative of the public, its authors are not limited to the relevant theoretical tools of the modern interpretation of institutional theory or 'new museology'. In particular, in the context of the Department's museological concept and in a research discussion with representatives of the 'new museology', the issue of 'authenticity' is re-thought anew: of a museum object, in connection with the characteristics of the aesthetic assessment of traditional and contemporary art, cultural memory, and heritage.