With 20.000 pieces, the Ruhr Museum's mineralogical collection is by no means the museum's largest collection, but it is certainly one of the most beautiful. Hardly anyone can escape the fascination, the richness of colour and form of these stones, which sparkle differently in every light, round, angular, jagged, bizarre and graceful, in short, taking on every imaginable and unimaginable colour and form.

The geological collection with its approximately 400.000 objects is not only one of the Ruhr Museum's largest and most important, but also one of its oldest. Even at the time of the museum's foundation and in its early days, objects from the history of the earth played an important role.

The archaeological collection, whose foundation goes back to the “Historischer Verein von Stadt und Stift Essen” (Historical Society of the City and Abbey of Essen) founded in 1880, comprises more than 50.000 objects from different periods, cultures and materials.

The pre-modern collection is one of the Ruhr Museum's oldest collections. Its history goes back to the founding of the museum, when the citizens of the city of Essen set out to collect the relics of a world threatened by industrialisztion and to reassure themselves of their traditions and identities. In this respect, the pre-modern collection is also, at least in its origins, the most regional, indeed the most local of the museum.

For the Ruhr Museum, the industrial history collection represents something like the core of its identity. For the Ruhr Museum on the Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site is of course primarily associated with industrial culture.

The Ruhr Museum's photographic collection sees itself as the pictorial memory of the Ruhr area. It exists since 1989, has been presented in exhibitions ever since and is constantly being expanded. It is now the largest and most important archive of historical and contemporary photographs of the region, its landscapes and cities, people, work and leisure, everyday life and festivities.