Scotch-Taping the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So last week I mentioned in passing the idea that older museums are, in some ways, a museum of museuming.  I thought it was something I'd discussed beyond a casual mention, but as I flip through the archives, it appears that it was in one of those posts that I only ever wrote in my head.  So unless you have access to Lucien's library you never read that.

I think this all ties back to the fact that my formative museum experiences both as a patron and an employee were at the Field Museum, which is an older institution with items that were prepped for the Chicago World's Fair still on display.  The Hall of Animals on the main level has been refreshed from time to time, but the bulk of the dioramas there are unchanged from the day the Field opened its doors in 1921.  There are a lot of older institutions like this - while some halls are renovated and updated, there are niches and corners and entire wings that remain largely the same as they were when the museum was conceived.

Photo CSGEO012695: Details of Ordovician brachiopod display from the Field Columbian Museum. The name of the fossil, its age, and the formation and location where it was collected were provided for each fossil, but little in the way of interpretation was provided for Museum visitors.  [Photo and caption cribbed directly from the Field Museum's website]

The thing is, a lot has changed in museuming (yes, it's a verb now.  "What do you do?" "Oh, I museum.").  Back in the day we stole native American remains and burned dodo skeletons to make room in collections and taped the Dead Sea Scrolls together with cellophane tape, because that was the best we could manage.  We sent expeditions to Africa to harvest their wildlife for our museum halls, and preserved their hides with arsenic, because that was the thing that was done.  Conservators and curators would (and do) blanch at these processes now, and many many staff hours spent are spent undoing old repairs and repatriating items that don't truly belong in museum collections.  But there's only so much that museums can do at any given time, which is why a visitor can find those untouched niches and halls with the out-of-date labels and dated mounting techniques.

And as much as I would love to see those halls updated in a way that would allow the beautiful artifacts there to speak to visitors more than they do now, I sort of love how they serve as a time capsule.  It's recursive: the exhibit in the museum showing, unintentionally, how exhibits in museums used to be made.  Older museums are, by default, a museum of museums.  They show what museums were, how they have changed, and point to what they can become.

Some people ignore those old halls and dated displays, and others wander through and imagine how great they could be if they were updated.  I've been guilty of both mindsets, but lately I've been making concerted effort to think about these older displays with a little more charity.  I try to imagine the excitement museum visitors in 1921 felt when they looked at that bear or that headdress, and I try to remember that one day, probably not as far away as I'd like, someone will look at the exhibits I am blown away by today and think, "Wow, I can't believe people ever thought this was a good exhibit."

For another, really nicely thought-out take on this general idea, check out this blog entry from the Field Museum's Fossil Invertebrates Division.  I stumbled across it while looking for pictures of some of the Field's early displays, and it's a great portrait of the evolution of museum displays.  And as proof that old doesn't always mean forgotten, I counted at least 5 specimens from the pre-WWII exhibits that are still on display at the Field Museum today.  That makes me pretty happy.