The mass production of religious items such as rosaries and holy cards poses a problem for the curators of religious artifacts at libraries and museums. How do you dispose of unwanted donations?
Museums across the U.S., including at Harvard University, collected human remains, which were often displayed to the public.
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Proposed legislation would identify and protect African American cemeteries. But it wouldn’t cover the remains of thousands of Black people in museum collections.
In our current context of rapidly improving technology, archives and museums must constantly make tough decisions about what to keep, what to refuse or even remove.
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Media coverage of the recent Dr. Seuss controversy are rooted in both a lack of awareness of the challenges and realities of maintaining collections and a false understanding of history.
New research shows COVID-19 threw existing inequalities into sharp relief: well-funded institutions were able to move their projects online, while smaller galleries struggled.
Specimen preservation means researchers don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time they ask a new question, making it critical for the advancement of science. But many specimens are discarded or lost.
This wooden dish from Broome, pre-1892, was made by Yawuru people, collected by police and later presented by the Commissioner of Police, Colonel Phillips, to the WA Museum.
Courtesy of the WA museum
A spear-thrower, a shell, a bowl, a vase, a bucket. Five very different items tell us much about the history of collecting, the role of Indigenous experts and the shadow of colonial violence.
The Gallery of Ecological Art (formerly China gallery) at the British Museum of Decolonised Nature.
Image courtesy John Zhang and Studio JZ
Paleontologists have discovered fossil remains belonging to an enormous ‘toothed’ bird that lived for a period of about 60 million years after dinosaurs.
Family Camping at Phillip Island, Victoria, 1951. Photographer: Leslie E. Chambers.
Unsplash/Museum Victoria
Too often in conversations about cultural centres, the incredible resources already available are neglected.The Berndt Museum, in Perth, is a collection of national and international significance.
This Jonkeria, an extinct animal from the Karoo that’s much older than the dinosaurs, was among the features of the old exhibition.
Author supplied
Cultural institutions are puzzling out to to make their buildings exciting and safe at the same time.
Specimens like these at Dublin’s Natural History Museum contain valuable information about the evolution of pathogens and host organisms.
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