From their website: The mission of the Louisiana State Museum (LSM) is to collect, preserve and present, as an educational resource,objects of art, documents, artifacts and the like that reflect the history, art and culture of Louisiana for the citizens and visitors to the State of Louisiana. LSM maintains, researches and exhibits artifacts from a permanent collection of nearly 500,000 objects, including visual arts, costumes, musical instruments, recordings, sheet music, photographs, and colonial documents.