Museology

Ask a German curator where a painting is and the answer may be im Außenmagazin. Nothing is being published. In a museum, a library or an archive, das Magazin is the store: the rooms of shelving, plan chests and racks where everything not on show is kept, and das Außenmagazin is the same thing in a second building, often on the edge of town. German does use Magazin for a glossy periodical and for a television programme as well, which is exactly why the reading goes wrong: the learner has met the newsstand sense first. English is the language that let the older meaning go. It survives there only where things are stored for firing, in a powder magazine and in the magazine of a rifle. So when a German sentence says an object wird magaziniert, it is being put into storage, and ein Objekt aus dem Magazin holen means fetching it from the shelves, not quoting it in print.