Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand their research methods” — are welcome to attend. Because of the venue, there will probably be a lot of focus on sci, tech and med museum artefacts.

Great initative. My only hesitation is the title — Reading Artefacts. What do the organisers actually mean by reading an artefact?

In my understanding of reading, there is a text to be read. But an artefact is not a text (unless there is a label glued on to it), so there is nothing to read.

The only way I can make sense of the title is that they use the verb ‘read’ metaphorically. That is, they probably don’t believe that an artefact is a literal text which is read like the text you are reading now. What they probably mean is that curators and historians engage with artefacts in a way that is analogous to the way readers read texts, and they use the verb ‘read’ as a short-hand for this analogy.

But how useful is it to think about our engagement with artefacts in analogy with reading texts? Granted, it may be useful as a rhetorical device, or for science journalism purposes. But I’m afraid the analogy is counterproductive from a scholarly point of view, because it draws one’s attention away from the epistemologically thorny issues at stake:

How do we actually engage with material artefacts? How do we make sense of them? How do they actually influence us? Is there any kind of seimotic interaction going on between humans and dead material things, or is it ‘merely’ physical interaction?

In other words, ‘reading artefacts’ is not one of those metaphors that curators ‘live by’. On the contrary, I suggest it’s one of those metaphors that kills the curatorial imagination.

That said, however, the course looks very useful; it will give the participants an opportunity to:

• investigate artifacts, trade literature and photographic collections as resources for research, teaching, and the public presentation of history
• work with leading collection scholars in a national museum setting to explore material culture methodologies and approaches
• use artifacts as the centre of discussion and hands-on activities
• immerse themselves in a material culture perspective of the technological past
• learn the basics of conservation, cataloguing and developing collections in local environments – a growing and essential resource for history studies.

Tuition fee is 250 Can. $ for students, 350 for postdocs and 450 for faculty and professionals (but it includes breaks, lunches, and a field trip; and students can get some financial support). Register here before 16 June, but do it long before then, because they can only accomodate 30 participants. Further info from Anna Adamek, aadamek@technomuses.ca. One can also join the Google Group here.

We’re talking about quite ordinary (but extraordinarily small) silicon chips that are made of a normal semiconductor material and produced by usual manufacturing methods. The chips can be used as intracellular sensors and the possibilites are endless — e.g., characterization, quantification and IRT monitoring of molecular processes at the single cell level.

This sounds like a promising route for molecular medicine. But it’s a potential nightmare for future medical museum curators. Good old steampunk medicine was about surgical instruments that operated on the level of visible organs. Now we’ve got a double problem: not only do we have to collect and preserve invisible cell-lines, but also take care of their invisible chips. 

Does this mean the end of medical museum collections as we know them? Has anybody got a good idea for how to collect, preserve and display these creatures?

Now I am beginning to think about a third volume in the ’series’ to catch up with new trends in science historiography. One of the most interesting issues — both from a museological and historiographical point of view — is how historians should deal with the growing avalanche of scientific digital documents.

I.e., how to preserve, utilise, and make sense of the enormous output of digitalised desk and laboratory data for the writing and displaying of contemporary history of science? Not just gigabytes of text documents (like manuscripts, electronic lab notebooks and emails), but also terabytes of quantitative experimental data — not to forget digitalised images and material things that embody such data (such a microarrays and biobanks).

Our guest blogger Martin Fenner wrote a very inspiring post about digital preservation a few weeks ago. “It’s surprising”, Martin concluded, ”that we have barely started to think about digital preservation”.

Another scholar who has thought about the problem is university archivist and library administration scientist Christopher Prom, currently a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies, University of Dundee.

Prom is giving a talk here in Copenhagen next Thursday (4 March), titled ”Preserving the ‘Papers’ of 21st Century Science”, in which he will review the current state of work in preserving digital records and provide some suggestions regarding methods and tools that archives and others stakeholders can use to make sure that the electronic record of the 21st century will be accessible also in the 22nd. Here’s his abstract:

We cannot understand the full impact of scientific work without access to the correspondence, notes, and other materials that scientists generate on a daily basis. But how, in the digital era, can we best preserve the ‘papers’ generated by scientists? Such records are stored as mere electronic impulses, distributed across many locations, and written in formats that cannot be rendered without machines and software. As a result, rich historical sources, such as correspondence in email format, are at risk. Recent events in East Anglia demonstrate that such records are susceptible to hacking and misrepresentation in the short term. In the long term, they may be even more susceptible to loss through corruption or neglect.

The venue for Prom’s talk is the Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17; it starts at 2.15 pm. Copenhagen historian of physics Finn Aaserud organises the event.

It’s materials and objects which make the preservation of the contemporary biomedical heritage for future generations pretty tricky. The short course ‘The Problem with Plastics’ given by Helen Alten at The Northern States Conservation Center last week would have been quite useful for the conservation tasks in medical museum like ours.

Maybe somebody would like to arrange a similar course for conservators in Europe?

Well, at least this is what the organisers of a meeting in Dresden next April seem to be suggesting. I think they are exaggerating a bit :-). But that said, the theme of the meeting — KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen [contemporary bodies, new technologies, new collections] — is right on the spot.

The point of departure for the meeting — jointly organised by Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin and Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden — is that the colonisation of the body by means of the life sciences has resulted in a gradual retreat from the immediately visible and material body.

An invisible biomedical body

The concepts, models and findings of contemporary biomedicine defy immediate visualisation, collecting and conservation. Therefore museums like Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, which was founded with the purpose of displaying the body, find themselves in an entirely new situation.

I couldn’t agree more — this is actually the central point in the paper on biomedicine as a challenge to museums that Adam, Camilla and I have just published. So we have every reason to participate (if we can: the meeting language is German and my German is rusty at best :-).

Rusty or not — it’s worth participating, because the meeting will address three types of timely questions for medical museums: first, the history of the techniques, tools and concepts by means of which the human body has been cut, dissected, interpreted and displayed; second, whether current biomedicine has made the body immaterial; and third, how the new biomedical body affects museum collection practices.

The meeting takes place 22-24 April next year. Read the call for papers here. If you want to participate, send a note to Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, tagungszentrum@dhmd.de, or contact one of the four organisers: Sandra Mühlenberend (sandra.muehlenberend@dhmd.de), Susanne Roeßiger (susanne.roessiger@dhmd.de), Uta Kornmeier (kornmeier@zfl-berlin.org or Katrin Solhdju (solhdju@zfl-berlin.org).

Das Symposium setzt sich u.a. zum Ziel, gemeinsam nach neuen Aufgaben fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen zu suchen, Strategien zu entwickeln, um den Fortbestand der Sammlungen sicherzustellen und Zukunftskonzepte zu erörtern, die traditionelle Universitätssammlungen besser in den Hochschulalltag integrieren und den heutigen Anspruchen von Forschung, Lehre und Wissenschaftskommunikation gerecht werden. Daruber hinaus soll ein Netzwerk fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen im deutschsprachigen Raum etabliert werden, um den dringend erforderlichen Austausch von Erfahrungen und Kenntnissen in Gang zu setzen.

See further: http://universitaetsmuseen.hu-berlin.de (conference language will be German)

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 little more complicated (especially the orderly display part :-), but that’s the essence of it. This is what museums usually do.

Using collections for teaching and research purposes doesn’t come easily, however. Most museums don’t have to think about it because they are not involved in much regular teaching, and (sorry to say this) because most museums don’t do much research at all (despite their occasional self-understanding). They are usually tuned towards producing exhibitions for mass consumption.

University museums are in a somewhat different situation. They are also involved in exhibition making, of course. But, in addition, they belong to institutions that value research and teaching activities much higher than displays for hoi polloi. So university museums are supposed to engage in research and teaching to a much greater extent than their non-university cousins.

Now, for the benefit of all university museums around the world, UMAC (University Museums and Collections, a subcommittee of ICOM) is organising its 9th international conference in 2009 around the theme ‘Putting university collections to work in research and teaching’, to be held at the UC Berkeley campus, 10-13 September 2009.

The conference theme interestingly takes the Polish Archival Dictionary’s definition of ‘archive’ — “an institution called upon to guard, collect, sort, preserve, keep and render accessible documents, which, although they are no longer useful on a daily basis as before, nonetheless merit being preserved” — as its point of departure:

It is worth considering the relevance of this definition to the status of university museums and collections. The archival role of public museums, their responsibilities to preserve the material heritage they contain, seems clear enough. In the case of university museums and collections, however, the description of being “no longer useful on a daily basis as before” is seldom accurate. Very frequently, the objects held in academic collections are still quite actively used in research and in the classroom. The dividing lines among the accumulation of objects in individual faculty laboratories, departmental teaching collections and fully-fledged university museums are blurry. Indeed, university museums are full of objects, specimens and artifacts that entered the university in the course of faculty research and teaching activities. In justifying the relevance (and in some cases even the continued existence) of university collections, their ongoing utility in relation to the teaching and research missions can be paramount (my emphasis).

The organising committee welcomes presentations from the full range of university collections:

Universities are very different from public museums in containing research materials that may be lodged in formal museums, departments, and individual faculty labs and offices, and that span the full disciplinary range of the university. This multiplicity of collections, and the slippage among them, has created challenges and opportunities that may be analyzed and even celebrated as part of the unique culture and history of university museums. How do collections respond to changes in their user communities, to conflicting demands by different user groups, or to changing research technologies? Collections of historical scientific instruments are good examples of artifacts that have shifted from being research tools (in the sciences) to objects of research themselves (in the humanities). How might these sorts of transformations be encouraged? What are some examples of renewed scholarly or scientific activity that have resulted from either new museum initiatives? How can preservation as a primary mission be balanced with active research and providing classroom access?

They encourage papers that give an historical perspective to these questions, papers that address instances of current programs, difficulties and successes, and papers that suggest new models for developing the research and teaching potential of museum collections for diverse user communities:

• Where are university collections and museums placed within the administrative structure of the university? Are they allied to one particular department or discipline, or are they freestanding in their research affiliations? How has administrative placement affected research uses, demands by different user groups, and other functions of the museum? How can collections make themselves more visible to new scholars and students so that they can maximize their research potential?
• All disciplines change over time, asking new questions, employing new methods and exploring new objects. Inevitably this means that the relationships of material collections to their disciplines also shift. How have these changes affected the research potential of collections? One dramatic instance in recent decades has been the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms of DNA analysis, which have changed not only the nature of cladistics but also transformed the relevance and viability of natural history collections.
• Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations are now at the forefront of most research, even in the humanities. How have such collaborative research programs affected the use of collections?
• How are collections used for teaching? Are there accessibility issues that must be solved? In particular, how are they made available to undergraduates for research as well as teaching or display purposes? Are there instances where public or community groups become involved in the teaching or research functions of the museum? How can university museums and collections best convey the findings of current research to students and the general public? Can and should the research mission of a museum be integrated into its public mission?

You have to observe a host of rules if you want to submit an abstract before 31 March; see the call for papers here. See also the UMAC’s website.

The point of departure for the conference is the historical trend over the last centuries of an increasing professionalism in museum collecting, Yet ‘amateurs’ have always been, and still are, important in the collecting practice. So how do amateur collecting practices differ from professional?

The meeting will address issues like the changing role of the amateur collector, the amateur-professional divide, the historic context of collecting (from cabinets of curiosities to contemporary collecting), the ethics of collecting, personal collections (from living room displays to private institutions), etc.

The organizers are basically interested in the relations between anthropology/ethnology and collecting, but other -ologies will be considered as well, for example specialist vs. non-specialist collecting among amateur/professional geologists or ornithologists.

I think this conference raises an interesting set of issues, because collecting practices in medical museums can be understood in similar amateur-professional terms. Medical doctors (i.e., amateurs in a museum context) dominated medical collecting until the second part of the 20th century.

One of the interesting features of medical museums is the distribution of skills and authority between amateur curators and professional curators. For obvious reasons, medical doctors and scientists often have better technical knowledge about the (sometimes very specialized) artefacts, their material composition and actual use than museum professionals have, and in addition the amateurs also have (or at least had) higher social and scholarly status in the academic pecking order.

Museum staff, on the other hand, not only have (or used to have) lower academic and social status, but also valued (and still value) other kinds of knowledge, such as cultural interpretation, methods of preservation, the aesthetics of display, etc.  Such differences in knowledge, skills, values and status have been sources of conflicts in medical museums — and sometimes still are.

Closing date for abstracts was last week, but maybe there is still a chance to attend — contact Sue Giles or Lisa Graves at the Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery (sue.giles@bristol.gov.uk or lisa.graves@bristol.gov.uk). 

All the artifacts will be handed back — either to our own storage facilities or to our generous lenders. For example, a set of delicate surgical knives and other equipment that we used to show aesthetic surgery are carefully packed to be sent back to the plastic surgery clinic at the National Hospital here in Copenhagen.

Below, our conservator Nicole Rehné walks away with some stuffed poultry, the (animal) remains (no living animals were harmed in the exhibition!) of the pioneering endocrinological experiments performed by Danish medical doctor Knud Sand in the 1930s.

We intend to keep the stuffed ones in storage and are not at all thinking of repatriating them to the indigenous fowl population in the South East Asian jungles :-)

The wall texts are scraped off. They looked good — but it’s hard work to remove them without destroying the underlying wall-paper (many grateful thanks to the designer who kept the wall texts short). Here Sven Erik Hansen, our in-house physician and guest researcher, removes letters — first the consonants, then the vowels. While our administrator, Carsten, concentrates on the headlines:

Soon the next temporary exhibition will fill the ground level show rooms. From Wednesday 21 January and three months on you can see Design4Science. More about that later. 

(thanks, Bente, for letting me use the Danish original on Museionblog)