museum studies

I came across this tweet from Archimuse the other day: OK, it’s just an ephemeral twitter post. But both the original tweet and the retweet are from influential sites (Archimuse and Museums and the Web, respectively), whose words should normally be taken seriously. So when they say that museum gallery rooms which are not assisted […]

Readers of this blog may remember that the 2010 biannual European medical museum conference was organised here at Medical Museion. The next biannual meeting, in 2012, will be hosted by our German sister museum, the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, 13-15 September. The theme for the Berlin meeting is ‘Hidden Stories: What do medical objects […]

I first got hooked on using Twitter in- and outside conference rooms when I attended last year’s Artefacts meeting at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. Hopefully the award-winning and refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh also has an acceptable wifi connection when hosting this year’s meeting, 7-9 October. This year’s meeting is thematically focused on scientific and technological museum artefacts against the backdrop of the notion […]

Roland Wittje participated in the Medical Museion MUSE seminar with a paper born out of his annoyance at an observed change in the role of the curator. He described winds of change in the museum world. A change away from the traditional curator with close and specific knowledge of the objects and collections in their […]

Medical Museion has launched a new seminar series: The MUSE seminars. The idea of the seminars is to explore questions in science communication and museum practices especially where they relate to modern biomedicine. We define science communication very broadly and speakers will come from a range of backgrounds including history of science, science communication, medical […]

We are proud to invite to the first seminar in our new MUSE seminar series: Roland Wittje, University of Regensburg From Material Culture to Material Heritage: History of Contemporary Science Beyond the Linguistic Turn Auditorium, Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen K Thursday 26 January, 3-4.40 pm Abstract: Getting our hands dirty in the messy […]

I just love this series of images from the Russian Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. The photographer, Mae Ryan, was primarily fascinated with the female custodians. But more fascinating, in my mind, are the galleries themselves — the huge rooms, the postwar bleak pastel colours, the curtains (yes, the curtains!), the refusal to translate into English, the […]

A couple of months ago, I announced a three day meeting titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, which some of our good medical museum colleagues in Leiden were about to put together for mid-February 2012. Their aim was to explore anatomical preparations and collections as cultural heritage rather than scientific collections; they were interested in what the technical details of anatomical preparations tell us about […]

I came to think about the role of narrativity in museum exhibitions when I saw the programme for the The Swedish National Exhibition Agency’s annual meeting in Visby last week. The aim of the Agency (Riksutställningar in Swedish) is to promote exhibition development. And since Sweden has a pretty strong, and internationally oriented, tradition for exhibition making, these meetings are a […]

Stefanie S. Jandl and Mark S. Gold are planning an edited volume tentatively titled Academic Museums, to be published by MuseumsEtc. next summer. The volume shall examine successful strategies, tactics and activities within the academic museum community internationally, and the editors are particularly interested in innovative practical experiences that can be applied within the wider museum community Their call […]

Universeum has grown into a potentially important organisation for the revival of European university museums. The annual meetings (the 12th was held in Padua last summer) could get an important role for raising the awareness among university administrations that their museums are not only worth preserving but, even better, worth expanding. I write “could get”, because — although I very […]

I’ve always felt making an exhibition was the equivalent to writing a book or making a work of art. In other words, I expect authors and artists to express their visions and ideas. I would never dream of writing or reading a book based on reader research (although I suspect some authors of popular crime novels do exactly […]