museum and knowledge politics

While we’re at it, here is another interesting conference coming up. (See here or here for recent posts about interesting conferences.) The Danish research center DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials) have organized a one-day conference at Roskilde University, September 22nd 2009. At the conference there will be presentations about a.o. […]

Make a note in your 2010 calendar already — for the 15th Congress of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS), which will be held here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, 17-19 September 2010. The congress theme revolves around the question: How can medical history museums contribute to the popular engagement in contemporary medicine and […]

Sonia Horn, current Director of Collections at the Medical University of Vienna, has recently announced on different email-lists that the collection of specimens from the university’s Department of Forensic Medicine has now been catalogued and digitised in its entirety. Great initiative! But I also noticed that for “ethical reasons” they will not make the collection available on the web; they only give researchers access. […]

My good friend and colleague Jim Edmonson (who is Head of the great Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio) sent me and some of his other colleagues an email the other day. Jim tells the story about how one of his friends, an obstetrician and collector of obstetric and gynaecological instruments, has recently been in […]

The Director’s office of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen announced today that the museum will put all its collections on Twitter. Hundreds of thousands of material artefacts (from electron microscopes to conjoined twins in pickles), tens of thousands of medical historical images, and hundreds of shelf meters of archival documents will be compressed, catalogued and publicly communicated in the Twitter […]

Our colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (in DC) are right now experiencing a dramatically increasing traffic from all over the world to their unofficial Repository of Bottled Monsters blog. From about 100 views a day to 300 views an hour last week. The reason for this stunning outreach success is that Wired.com and many […]

Just a reminder about the 10th annual UNIVERSEUM Network meeting in Toulouse, 11-13 June, 2009, which we announced a few months ago. The second call emphasis the following topics of interest: enhancing and promoting knowledge about European university museums, collections and archives preserving and documenting contemporary science and humanities in universities European projects for the study and increased access […]

Wayne Clough, the new head of the Smithsonian Institution, wants to change the venerable museum institution: “We need to make our collections, talented scholars and other resources accessible worldwide by providing additional platforms and vehicles for educating and inspiring large audiences,” he said to yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, and added: Our job is to authenticate and inform […]

The number of interesting (read: thoughtful and reflecting) museum blogs is growing steadily. One of my newfound favourites is Bridget McKenzie’s cultural interpretation & creative education, started in 2006. Bridget was, among other things, responsible for learning at the British Library before she became director of a consultancy firm that helps ‘cultural bodies’ engage with audiences, use digital technologies and build capacity. Accordingly, her […]

Seems like museum 2.0 has already come of age. Because the Smithsonian Institution has just hosted a two-day conference titled “Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age”. A stellar group of keynote speakers and experts from the web and digital worlds met with a group of Smithsonian staff on 23-24 January to take a closer look at the […]