Museums collect artifacts for the education and enjoyment of the public. Each artifact has it’s own story to tell, and research yields new discoveries about their secrets.Each museum tries to reflect the diversity of the experiences in it’s artifact collection. All artifacts provide a connection to the past. Some museums collect for artistic value or…
Read MoreMuseums collect various types of objects/specimens for many different reasons. I think some of the nuances of the specific reasons depend on the museum and their overarching goals and purposes, but here I will try to give a brief overview of the purpose of collections. As I am particularly interested in natural history collections, my…
Read MoreMod-5-why collect I have come across this recent article in the Jan 2021 issue of American Antiquity about employing experimental models to interpret old collections. The authors open with the reason why curators collect.
Read MoreI found this week’s discussion question very interesting and a touch more complicated that the simplicity of the question implies. Immediately, my mind did summersaults down a kaleidoscopic rabbit hole of related questions. How museums collect, what they do with what’s collected, and how it’s represented, including how collecting caused and continues to cause harm.…
Read MoreWhy do museums collect? Museums collect for several reasons, and these reasons have changed over the many years they have existed. Primarily Museum like collections existed to generate curiosity through the sometimes items contained within to wrench a few coins from the pockets of their patrons. Although these items may not have always been authentic,…
Read MoreWhy do museums collect? Museums collect artifacts for the education and enjoyment of the public. Artifacts have their own stories to tell, and the research yields new discoveries about their secrets and the people that had them. It is a museums mission to procure, preserve, exhibit, and interpret these objects. A museum should strive to…
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#5. Curation and Collecting: Why do we collect? The featured photo needs introduction. Steven Lubar, a professor of American studies at Brown, as he looks behind the scenes at museums, exploring the way that curators consider what to collect and how to display it. He’ll focus on the story of the Jenks Museum, Brown University’s museum…
Read MoreAfter reading the assigned 2003 article of Who Owns Native Culture by Brown, I had recollection of a flap over the Alaska Airlines logo and a tangential aside concerning the popular name designation for a celestial object tagged as the Eskimo Nebula. The flap over the Eskimo face and logo on the tail of AK…
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Uvluulluataq (Good Afternoon), I have struggled a bit with this question, I’m not sure if it’s meant to question the technical aspects of why particular museum types collect or the larger philosophical question of why I think museums collect. So I will try to answer both. My understanding of why museums collect is that it…
Read MoreI have read some of the articles in the latest issue of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and noticed it is full of many topics we have been discussing in our module posts. I have not included all the content in some but did include the full report from their president, Joe Watkins who…
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