museum studies

The program for the Universeum Network Meeting in Toulouse, 11-13 June, has eventually been put online. Unfortunately, none of us here at Medical Museion can participate because we are opening our next big exhibition, Split and Splice, on 11 June, so we will miss contribitions like ‘Towards a university research museum?’ (Daniel Raichvarg & Marie-Laure Baudement), ‘Web […]

My friend Michael (who is a regular reader of the German HSozuKult-list) has drawn my attention to the meeting ‘Wissenschaft im Museum: Ausstellung im Labor’, to be held in Tübingen, Germany, 8-9 April 2010. In contrast to the usual discourse about displays of science in museums, this English-German bilingual ‘Tagung’ will concentrate on the relationship between scientific practices and presentation […]

I’m receiving an increasing amount of mails, especially from knowledge institutions, research agencies and their ilk, with invitations to participate in sandpits and sandboxes of different kinds. It strikes me that the ‘sandpit’ (‘sandbox’) is a pretty new concept in my passive vocabulary (haven’t really made it part of my active lexicon yet). One organisation defines a ‘sandpit’ as […]

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 […]

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 […]

As a university museum, we are constantly thinking about how to use our huge collection of medical artefacts (est. 150.000-200.00 items) for research and teaching purposes. I mean, using artefacts in exhibitions is not that problematic. Find them on the shelves, dust them off, and put them in some kind of orderly display, that’s it. Well, it’s a […]

I have written about the Artefacts meeting series before (here, here and here). The 14th meeting will be hosted by Science Museum in London on 20-22 September 2009. The topic will be “The relations of science and technology as portrayed in museums”. Reserve the dates. Deadline will be around 1 April, but we’ll be back with a more […]

I’ve already mentioned the launch of the new University Museums and Collections Journal. The first issue has just been released online — there are two articles of potential interest for reflecting medical museums: In one of them, Sébastien Soubiran asks “What makes scientific communities think the preservation of their heritage is important?”, and answers the question through a […]

Here’s a conference which looks interesting for medical museum people: “Amateur Passions / Professional Practice: ethnography collectors and collections”, to be held 2-3 April 2009 at the Department of Archaeology, University of Bristol (organized by Museum Ethnographers Group in UK). The point of departure for the conference is the historical trend over the last centuries of an increasing professionalism […]

As I wrote last week, Deutsches Museum in Munich is an impressive colossus which also has its innovative moments. I’m thinking particularly of the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’, a small open nanotechnology research lab in the public area where ‘real’ nanotechnology researchers are doing their daily job. The laboratory was initiated last year by the museum’s director general, Wolfgang M. Heckl, […]

I’ve just spent three days at Deutsches Museum in Munich. Primarily to attend a conference about the relations between research and exhibitions in museums. But I also took the opportunity to see its famous public galleries. In spite of its name, Deutsches Museum is not about kings or wars or politics etc. — things that […]