museum and knowledge politics

On next Thursday, 16 April, I’m contributing to a meeting on the theme “ICOM’s Code of Ethics and the grey zones of museum practise”, organized by Danish ICOM. The background for the meeting is that ICOM’s current Code of Ethics (from 2004) apparently doesn’t cover a number of ‘grey zones’, which Danish ICOM believes may be in conflict with the Code, for […]

A couple of days ago, I argued against Christian Sichau’s restrictive acquisition policy for museums of science, technology and medicine. I suggested, not only to actively promote the acquisition of visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms, but indeed to open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff […]

Measured by the number of incoming emails and RSS-feeds, the big news in the science museum world today is a critical article by Edward Rothstein (“The Thrill of Science, Tamed by Agendas”) in the Arts Special section of yesterday’s New York Times. A century ago, Rothstein points out, museums were simply collections of objects: “And science […]

Nina has a point — her favourite museums are idiosyncratic. There are lots of “perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable” museums, but those that stick in one’s memory are those with individuality, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology. They are often small, because they are not run by committees, and the staff is passionate about what they are doing. Yet, as Nina […]

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 […]