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Category: Collections

Museumbots: An Appreciation

Museumbots: An Appreciation

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Meet the museumbot. Museumbots tweet random objects from museum collections, four or five objects a day. I know of three museumbots, and I’m sure there are more. @museumbot tweets Metropolitan Museum of Art collections, @cooperhewittbot, and @bklynmuseumbot their eponymous museums’ collections. Here’s the last few objects from @museumbot, as good a sample as any: It’s their randomness that makes museumbots so interesting. The two objects to the left are unlikely representatives of the Metropolitan Museum. A belt fragment? A dessert dish?…

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Call for Papers: Lost Museums Colloquium

Call for Papers: Lost Museums Colloquium

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In conjunction with the year-long exhibition project examining Brown University’s lost Jenks Museum, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and the John Carter Brown Library invite paper proposals for a colloquium on lost artifacts, collections and museums. (Other formats—conceptual, poetic, and artistic—are also invited.)  The colloquium will be held at Brown University May 7 and 8, 2015. Museums, perhaps more than any other institutions, think in the very long term:…

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21st-Century History of Technology: Fashioning a Usable Past

21st-Century History of Technology: Fashioning a Usable Past

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Yesterday the MIT Museum and the Hagley Museum and Library ran a fascinating workshop on “Doing the History of Technology in the 21st Century.” The workshop, at the MIT Museum, brought together historians, museum curators, public humanists, and more to talk about how the history of technology is changing – and how it needs to change – to play the role it needs to play as our sources, audiences, media, and interests change. It was partly about the digital, but more…

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Authenticity, and bears

Authenticity, and bears

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The scene: Roger Williams Natural History Museum, Providence, Rhode Island. A group of twenty third-graders has just arrived. The docent settles them down, tells them to use their inside voices and their walking shoes. But one boy can’t wait. His hand shoots up as soon as the docent asks for questions. Is it real? He’s been staring at a taxidermied bear. It hasn’t moved, as far as he knows. But it’s in a cage, sort of, surrounded by Plexiglas, and…

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A rock’s story

A rock’s story

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I’ve been following closely (this may sound odd) the story of a rock. Not just any rock, and not just any story. It’s a rock on Mars, and it’s been tweeting. So, a first-person Martian rock story. You can see the whole thing here, storified. The rock is sitting happily in Gale Crater. A strange robot from another planet arrives, shoots it with a laser, and leaves. Hard to imagine how to make this interesting. But it is. The rock has…

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“Facing the Museum,” Completed!

“Facing the Museum,” Completed!

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I’ve written about Faces – now called “Facing the Museum” several times on this blog. It started with the discover of several century-old “ethnographic busts” in the attic of the museum’s Collection Research Center, became more interesting as we teased out the stories of the busts, and then expanded into an overview of the history, challenges, and potentials of the anthropology museum. You can see the script of the show here. And here’s the blurb we’re using for PR:  “Facing…

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Cataloging in Public

Cataloging in Public

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CultureLab is almost done, and we’re refining the activities we’ll start off with. We’ve got artifacts for a half-dozen courses there, ready for students to study. And we’ve got a few hands-on kits in the works. And we’ve been exploring the possibilities of cataloging-in-public. We’ll bring uncataloged materials from our Collections Research Center in Bristol, 20 miles off campus, and have staff and students catalog them in the CultureLab. It not only saves them a trip to Bristol – it turns the…

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An update on “Facing the Museum”

An update on “Facing the Museum”

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I’ve written before about the discovery of “ethnographic busts” in the museum’s collection, and about my plans to use them as an introduction to the Museum. The plan has been percolating, slowly, and it’s time for an update. One reason things at museums take a long time is that it’s good policy to share drafts and get feedback on ideas. That’s especially true at a university museum. And the feedback on this exhibit has been strong. Anthropologists – even those…

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What I want from my collections management system

What I want from my collections management system

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One of the first problems I identified on becoming director of the museum was its collections management system. It infuriated me. The interfaces were arcane. The data was imprisoned in a proprietary system – one that seemed designed to make reports difficult and information sharing impossible. It was complicated, to the point where most of the staff just stayed away and asked the one person who could figure it out to use it. I’m not mentioning names. It’s a fairly…

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“Ethnographical busts”

“Ethnographical busts”

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This plaster cast is one of eight in the collection of the Haffenreffer Museum. They’re a bit of a mystery; there’s no paperwork on them. And they’re not the sort of thing the museum traditionally collected. They came from the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in the 1980s. That’s about as much as we knew. As much as we knew from the object, anyway. As historians, anthropologists, and curators, we knew that these figures of “races of…

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