museum studies

Tiffany Jenkins is soon coming out with a book titled Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority in Routledge’s ‘Research in Museum Studies’ series. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic work, and media and policy documents, the book analyzes, says Routledge’s announcement, “the influences at play on the contestation over human remains, and examines the social construction of […]

Travel guides and leisure sections in the newspapers regularly list museums you just “must” see. But I’ve never actually seen a list of museums that I’m supposed to be discouraged from visiting. Until now — here’s one that covers “the most unnecessary museums in the United States”:  The Museum of Bad Art: The justification for […]

Ready for some digital intoxication again: Adrienne Fletcher, a graduate student in the Department of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida has made a social media museum research survey which says something about how (American) museums intend to and actually use social web media. Facebook is considered the most effective medium, with Twitter on a second place. Typical […]

I just read a short article by Marion Maria Ruisinger (curator of the medical collections at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the UMAC Journal — and was struck by the fact that she declares, without much ado, that “three-dimensional objects … have an immense potential for the communication of science”. I agree, intuitively. I’ve used the same argument in applications for […]

All of us who have been following Nina’s blog about museum 2.0 are happy to hear that her book project about visitor participation in museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries has come to a temporary end. She describes The Participatory Museum as “a practical guide to visitor participation … the nuts and bolts of successful […]

A few months ago, I advertised the meeting ‘KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen’ to be held at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, 22-24 April. Now the program has been finalised — and it looks very good! After a plenary discussion on ‘Schauplätze der Schönheit: Klinik, Kunst, Medien und Museen’ on Thursday evening, there follows two days […]

Since the snow descended upon Copenhagen a month ago everybody has been walking around wrapped up in scarfs and woollen clothing, trying to avoid the snowdrifts. Personally, my thoughts wander off to a warmer place — more specifically Southern France, where I took some needed holiday last summer and visited, among other things, the two medical museums in Toulouse. […]

It’s soon time for a new meeting in the ‘Artefacts’ series (for posts on earlier meetings, see here, here, here and here). This is the 15th annual meeting since the inception of the series in the mid-1990s, and this year’s theme is ‘Knowledge on the Move: Conflict, Displacement and Re-Engineering Society: 1933 to 1989’: The […]

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 […]

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 […]

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010. This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology. The image of medicine that emerges from most museum […]

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 […]