museum and knowledge politics

Yesterday, Vancouver-based writer and curator Robin Laurence wrote a persuasive plaidoyer for post-postmodern art, which I believe has some implications for the understanding of bioart in museums (I’ve been musing about bioart in sci/tech/med museums before). Laurence identifies a movement of “emerging and established artists who are working with found and salvaged materials, discarded objects […]

Just got a letter from the University of Bath librarian, who says that the National [i.e., UK] Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists is closing 31 October. That’s sad, because in the 22 years since the unit moved to Bath, it has been instrumental in securing nearly 200 scholarly archives in institutional libraries around the UK — […]

There are several kinds of cooperations between sci-med-tech museums, and I’m not particularly critical of any of them (except one). But I’m nevertheless waiting for someone to take the initiative to a SciMedTechMusGang. I’m thinking of something analogous to the BioGang — “an informal, distributed collection of geeky life scientists who have come together to try and think of cool […]

Michael Kimmelman’s article in yesterday’s New York Times on why so few museum visitors seem to take their time to really look at things is inspirational. Not to mention the 419 readers’ comments. If you ever needed a set of arguments for the benefit of more intense looking in museums, here they are. Next question is — what […]

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 […]