CultureLab: Policies and Procedures
We’re not quite done pulling CultureLab together, but the semester has begun, and classes have begun to use the space! One of the wonderful things about museum spaces is how they change once they are full of people. Designers and curator, I think, tend to imagine spaces without people, pristine in their displays, objects on the stage, words there to be studied. It’s much harder to imagine a space full of people, each at least as interesting as any object…
From the Brown Daily Herald on the Haffenreffer Museum
(from the Brown Daily Herald) Hidden gems abound at the Haffenreffer Elizabeth Koh Staff Writer Published: Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Sam Kase / HeraldThe Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology features over 1 million artifacts. With his bushy white hair, active Twitter feed and hipster glasses, Steven Lubar, professor of American studies, is not your typical museum director. He presides over a collection of artifacts including jade coins and primitive spearheads, all lovingly labeled and nestled away in a corner of the Main Green….
Cataloging in Public
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…
CultureLab update
In February the museum will open CultureLab. I’ve written about it before, when it was just an idea – that post showed a rough floor plan, and reproduced our planning document – a document based on the ideas and interests of museum staff, and also the input of students in my Museums and Communities collecting and collections course, and the very imaginative ideas of Brian Kernaghan’s RISD course on museum design. SInce then, it’s become a set of plans (the good work…
About the CultureLab
This summer we’ll be designing and building the CultureLab, a new space in Manning Hall. Part open storage, part study center, part seminar room, it’s an opportunity to show off the museum’s collections and provide hands-on learning opportunities to students. Still very much a work in progress. Below, a document describing it, and left, a very rough sketch of a floor plan.
