museum and knowledge politics

Like most museums, Medical Museion is a member of the International  Council of Museums (ICOM). The major benefit of membership is that you don’t have to pay entrance to other member museums (and sometimes are allowed to bypass the queue by getting in through the VIP entrance, which gives a kick of feeling important). But except for this, one doesn’t really get much […]

We have a old and pretty dysfunctional website. Shall we rebuild it (using the university’s system) or not? All other great museums have fancy, big websites with lots of rich media functionalities. They cost hundreds of hours and enormous sums of money to build and maintain. Are they worth it? Or are the days of big websites numbered? Mitch […]

In the early morning — just before Johanna began to make the usual noices to indicate she wanted to be transferred to our bed for a last cosy hour of sleep — my eyes fell on this sentence in a piece by Douglas Haddow in Adbusters (‘The coming barbarism’): Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an […]

I’ve just received the announcement for the 11th annual meeting of Universeum (the European network for university heritage) in my inbox. The meeting will be held in Uppsala, 17-20 June, on the theme ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’. The organisers invite submissions of papers devoted to “academic heritage in its broadest sense, tangible and intangible, namely the preservation, study, access […]

Can’t resist forwarding a query from Keni Sturgeon, curator at Mission Mill Museum (a textile museum in Oregon), on the ACUMG-list. Keni, who also teaches museum studies at Western Oregon University, is in the midst of planning “a graduate course on Small Museums” and would like some input from other small museums, especially college and university museums/galleries: […]

Science centers — institutions for the promotion of public engagement with science and technology — have mushroomed all over the world since Frank Oppenheimer started Exploratorium in San Francisco more than forty years ago. (Jessica has just written an interesting review of K. C. Cole’s recent biography of Oppenheimer). Would you agree with this view of […]

At the last weekly staff lunch meeting we had a short discussion about the notions of ‘topical’ and ‘timely’ exhibitions. A ‘topical/timely’ (Danish: aktuel) exhibition is one that relates to current social or political events, like for example showing a climate exhibition here in 2009. One argument in the discussion was: Aren’t topical/timely exhibitions exactly what […]

Psychiatric museums have come a long way since their early days. Before the 1980s, private collections of aficionados made up the field. Since then, several psychiatric museums have emerged. Today, these institutions have turned into modern museums creating numerous exhibitions and reaching large audiences. The most successful of the psychiatric museums have more than 140.000 […]

In one of his last blog posts Thomas argued that university museums are basically elitist institutions.  Thomas argues that the basic success criterion for museums is the popularity of their exhibitions and number of visitors where on the other side the success criterion for a university museum is the quality and originality of their research. Of […]

University of Copenhagen has several museums (among them Medical Museion). And our university isn’t alone. Many, if not most, universities around the world have their own museums, or at least historical collections. There are in fact so many of the kind that the international museum council (ICOM) has set up a subcommittee specifically for university museums and collections (UMAC). […]

Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science. As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in […]

The Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies is organising an interesting conference in Copenhagen on 6-7 November. Under the title “Event Culture: The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art”, the conference will discuss the changing role of the art museum and the role of contemporary art within the art museum during the past decades […]