The university museum: respecting old values, embracing new directions (original) (raw)

A Natural Science Museum as a Resource for Teaching and Learning

International Journal of Zoology and Animal Biology, 2021

Nowadays, museums are conceived as places of educational value; they enable areas to promote learning related to specific topics, and they allow visitors to understand and interpret their environment, among other potentialities. This work presents the results of an experience carried out at the La Plata Museum (MLP) in which teachers and students of the Teaching Training Course in Natural Sciences participated through the Workshop "Learning science between showcases, tablets and biological collections". In this workshop, the participants were proposed to explore the potentialities of the strategies used in the MLP Exhibition Rooms, resorting to information and communication technologies, and approaching the Biological Collections, so that they can incorporate them into their teaching practices and respond to a survey. The workshop included four moments (start-Interactive area; Exhibition Hall; Biological collections; End-interactive area) with the aims of acquiring scientific skills, recognizing biological collections as valuable teaching resources, and promoting the importance of the teacher-museum relationship.

Challenging Collections: Approaches to the Heritage of Recent Science and Technology

Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology

In this volume we aim to reflect on not only the nature of scientific and technological artifacts post World War II but also the nature of today's "museum ecosystem" as it has emerged over this period. Museums are no longer primarily repositories that preserve and classify material culture. They must balance a number of functions, not always mutually compatible: exhibition, preservation, research, and education. Collections can be regarded as important material resources for historians of science and technology who in recent decades have moved on from telling narratives of progress to exploring science and technology in a wider cultural, social, and political context. Meanwhile, over this period the nature of museums' relationships with their public has shifted from one of unquestioned authority to a partner in dialogue: visitors' needs are now considered foremost in exhibition interpretation, and the public may even have a say in shaping collections. Conceptualizing Contemporary Collecting In building collections that help us make sense of the world, the framework of the historian must be combined with the material knowledge, experience, and sometimes sheer instinct of the curator. In the volume's first section, we have asked leading curator-historians to reflect on what historiographically informed collecting practices might look like when concerned with contemporary material culture. John Durant argues that museums are uniquely positioned to tell rich and meaningful stories about the place of science and technology in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century society as a contribution to a "thick description" approach: several of the artifacts he describes Alternative Approaches Our next two contributors, from within museums and without, offer some alternative perspectives on recent collecting practices. Olov Amelin questions whether explicitly stated rationales, including those present in contributions to this volume, are desirable at all, offering Universities play a very special role in contemporary heritage efforts as they are particularly close to the spaces of the production of knowledge and artifacts. Roland Wittje reflects on his engagement with collection in university environments over more than a decade. Finally, Thomas Söderqvist offers a personal view as historian of contemporary science and technology turned curator advocating relinquishing the narrative-oriented approach common in many museums in favor of strategies driven by the artifacts themselves. These interviews, and the contributions throughout the volume, demonstrate the variety and divergence of opinions and approaches in making sense of recent science and technology through material artifacts. We envisage Challenging Collections as part of an ever-evolving dialogue among communities of collectors and scholars seeking to keep pace with the changing landscapes of science and technology and of museology and historiography. We believe it is important to continually reflect on our active roles in creating values through the preservation and research of material culture and to share our experiences of developing intellectual frameworks for collecting. In the words of Howard N. Fox, "Among museums, or within encyclopaedic museums, contemporary collections might position themselves in the spirit of Wunderkammer, more as laboratories and sites of discovery than places of sacred trust intended to preserve the received culture. A healthy curiosity is in order. Contemporary curators, like scientists and contemporary artists, should not resist experimentation; it's part of the job." 10

Role of university museums and collections in disseminating scientific culture

Resimo Partindo da definiçâo de museus cientificos corno os contextos materials onde os artefactos cientîficos e tecnológicos sâo preservados e onde a cultura cientifica é elaborada e disseminada, discutem-se entâo os diferentes meios de que dispôem os museus de história da ciência e os museus de ciência para cumprir a sua missâo. Devido à sua origem, os museus universitarios possuem pontos em comum corn estes dois tipos de museus e também têm um papel a desempenhar, quer na investigaçâo quer na inovaçâo em museologia e em museogratia das ciências. Sobretudo, constituent locais onde a cultura cientifica é disseminada. Abstract Starting from the definition of scientific museums as the material context where scientific and technological artefacts are preserved and scientific culture is elaborated and disseminated, the different ways in which museums of history of science and science museums accomplish their task will be addressed. University museums, due to their origins, have feature...

Museums and museums: the picture of scientific museums

Journal of Science Communication

In the field of scientific communication in Europe, science centres have gained increasing importance over the last ten years. Italy, beyond the City of Science in Naples, is also planning the set up of more science centres throughout the country. Their hands-on style makes them something between a museum and a fun fair and, beyond the issue of merit, no doubt the success of many science centres also depends on the fun offered. It is important then to be able to assess to what extent people can actually make use of the proposed themes. This report tries to point out the dialogue opportunities between science museums and people1. A questionnaire has been submitted to two scientific secondary schools in Trent and Busto Arsizio (Varese) as a pilot study in this research. A research of this kind should not limit itself to museums, because public opinion on scientific subjects is also influenced by more popular and widespread media such as newspapers and television. Together with people,...

Democratizing the collection: Paradigm shifts in and through museum culture

The Queensland Museum geosciences collection is vast, with over five million individual items, intriguing, and of great interest to a wide variety of audiences in Australia and overseas. Recent developments in imaging technologies, the rapid evolution of the Internet, a corresponding increase in ‘digital natives’ and expectations of greater access to virtual collections are impetuses for museums, worldwide, to digitize their collections. This trend may be considered in a democratic context, as museums strive to provide online access. Their goal, in contrast to the two-dimensional (2D) digitization of collections in Libraries/Art galleries/Herbaria, is to provide access to three-dimensional (3D) digital objects. The Queensland Museum, like most museums, only has a small portion of the collection on display and the most scientifically significant specimens are kept in a secure, environmentally controlled type store. This is one of the essential paradoxes of museums – that in order to protect and conserve natural history collections, physical access has to be restricted. However, we argue that in response to these emerging imaging technologies the traditional, scientific research culture of the museum is evolving and adapting novel research methodologies to enhance access to the most significant specimens held by the museum. As a result, the following artist–scientist–technology collaboration highlights our use of digital imaging techniques; specifically photogrammetry and medical computed tomography (CT) scanning to create ‘virtual’ type specimens. Two digitized type specimens are presented here as exemplars. We consider these as exciting first steps to democratizing the Museum’s Geosciences collection, as an accessible on-line resource for a diversity of end users.

Un-Natural Histories: The Specimen as Site of Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art

Leonardo

One of the primary functions of museums is the preservation and deployment of knowledge as articulated through collected artifacts. In the case of natural history museums, these collections consist largely of preserved specimens that, despite being natural in origin, all share the marks of the human hand as a result of the processes of preservation and display. Such processes engender a fusion of nature and culture: the transformation of nature into objects of material culture. Given the challenges that arise from shifting definitions of what constitutes a natural history specimen in an age when life is being redefined and reconfigured, and living matter is treated as a mutable and expressive substance, I question how our perception of the "order of life" has been impacted by recent developments in genetic manipulation, tissue engineering, and DNA taxonomy. I extend the discussion of the impact of the human hand on natural objects to include the practices of contemporary artists whose practices borrow heavily from museum technologies, such as taxidermy, wet preservation, field research, scientific illustration, and bioartists whose practices use biotechnology to investigate the shifting relationship between living organisms and taxonomy. I ask how the work of artists who are addressing these classificatory shifts can illuminate how we understand such changes. How can the work of artists using biotechnology be positioned in relation to artists who use more traditional practices to address similar issues? How is the discipline of the natural history museum implicated in these practices? I focus on the hierarchical nature of knowledge in art and science, the changing use of language in classification, systems of preservation and display, and mutations and hybrid organisms, to suggest that natural history as a discipline, can be viewed as a mediating factor between the museum, on the one hand, and both scientific and art practices on the other. The specimen therefore functions as a site of knowledge production that merges both the museological impulses of preservation and conservation with the scientific/laboratory-based impulses of experimentation and alteration.