Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History

MUSEUM RESEARCH TRAINING USING SMITHSONIAN COLLECTIONS

The Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) is a research training program offered by the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History with major funding from the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation. The program seeks to promote broader and more effective use of museum collections in anthropological research by providing a supplement to university training. Each summer SIMA supports 10-12 graduate students who want to use collections in their research. 

Using Smithsonian collections, experts, and visiting faculty, SIMA:

-introduces students to the scope of collections and their potential as data 

-provides training in appropriate methods to collect and analyze museum data 

-makes participants aware of a range of theoretical issues relating to collections 

-positions students to apply their knowledge within their home university. 

The curriculum, including both seminars and hands-on workshops, teaches students how to navigate museum systems, select methods to examine and analyze museum specimens, and recognize the wealth of theoretical issues that museum data can address. 

For more information on SIMA visit: http://anthropology.si.edu/summerinstitute

Deadline: 1 March 2015

Ancient Culture Goes Online as National Museum Digitises

Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia

by Christopher Scott, January 29, 2014

After nine years of locating works, cross-checking records, photographing and finally cataloguing, the National Museum has unveiled its online database, which features more than 16,000 entries ranging from ancient statues to paintings and manuscripts.

Launched on January 3, the database is the only fine arts system of its kind in Cambodia, with its web presence enabling museum curators to locate and document works, as well as providing the public with access.

Funded by the Leon Levy Foundation, the National Museum of Cambodia collaborated with the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), an international, non-governmental organisation that supports and promotes research and scholarly exchange with Cambodia.

“It’s extremely important for Cambodians as well as researchers, whether they be just generally interested in Cambodian art, wanting to actually locate, write about or research something in particular in the collection,” Darryl Collins, project director and member of the CKS board of directors, said.

Prior to the online database, museum records were scattered in three different formats, with several French card cataloguing systems, Khmer handwritten inventory lists and a pre-existing database.

“Before it was rather laborious; virtually you had to turn up on the doorstep of the National Museum Of Cambodia to talk to the curatorial staff or the director and find out about a particular piece,” Collins said.

More here. 

Special Hearst Museum Tour

Please join us for a tour of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology's storage facilities on Wednesday, November 14 from 9-10:30AM.  There are only 17 spots available for this special event hosted by Ira Jacknis and Jonathan Goodrich of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology.  The first to reply get to join the tour.  Tour attendees must pay for their own transportation to the Hearst off-site storage facility at 1100 67th Street, Oakland.

Please e-mail CMA board member Jennifer Kramer at jennifer.kramer@ubc.ca if you wish to attend.

SAR Looks to Expand

The 105-year-old School for Advanced Research could double the size of its east-side Santa Fe campus due, in part, to a new relationship with a national foundation.

The anthropology and archaeology institute is moving toward buying 7.44 acres immediately south of its 7.8-acre campus of 40 years at 660 Garcia St.

The school has a contract to acquire the undeveloped land from the Howells family -- relatives of Martha Root White and Amelia Elizabeth White, wealthy New Yorkers who moved to Santa Fe in the 1920s to build a large home, called El Delirio.

More here

Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis

It seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers who turned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans to use the pictures were made public.

New York City’s fire chief protested that such a display would “honor” the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. A New York Post editorial called the idea “appalling.” Groups representing rescuers, survivors and victims’ families asked how anyone could even think of showing the faces of the men who killed their relatives, colleagues and friends.

More here

And, one of your editors' own contributions to the debate here.

Death of a Museum

CEDAR FALLS --- Michael Stahr pulls open a storage drawer at the University Museum and gazes at the collection of objects at his gloved fingertips. He hefts a rock specimen in his hand and examines it, replaces it and scribbles on his clipboard.

"I'm going through the entire geological collection and judging which rocks are best to keep in the collection," said the Davenport senior who will graduate from the University of Northern Iowa in May with an earth sciences degree. "I'm getting actual experience and using my expertise."

Seated at a desk nearby, Reinbeck graduate student Zach Moye carefully handles a worn leather holster and a stack of frayed drab olive green knapsacks. He started cataloging Civil War military memorabilia months ago, then items from the Spanish-American War and now pieces from World War I.

Read More here

The Digital Return: Meeting Report

On January 19, 2012, twenty-eight participants convened at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC for the “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge” workshop ...

More here

NPS Searchable Online Database

Now live online at www.museum.nps.gov

This searchable online database provides access to thousands of images and records from the National Park Service (NPS) museum collections. NPS museum collections include diverse disciplines and have unique associations with park cultural and natural resources, eminent figures, and park histories. Online visitors can perform simple or advanced searches by keyword, park name, object name, people, places, and date. Visitors can also browse or search collection highlights and park summaries.

These objects come from National Park Service (NPS) museums. NPS museums collect objects specific to the mission of the individual parks and interpret those collections in their original context. The collections are site-specific, that is, they pertain to that particular NPS site. With the exception of house museums, most other museums gather thematic collections from many different sites and house them in one place.

This project is an ongoing initiative. The records found in this database will vary in the level of detail. Records and images will be updated and added on a continued basis. Currently there are 44 parks with collections online representing over a million objects. We expect this number to grow considerably in 2012.

Please browse, enjoy, and learn from the collections!

The Blackfoot Shirts Project

Great to see some media for the 2011 CMA Ames Prize winners ...

The shirts date back nearly 200 years, made from elk and deer hide and some decorated with porcupine quill embroidery, hide fringe, and strands of horse and human hair. They were once proudly worn by the Blackfoot people of North America. However, few Blackfoot had ever seen the shirts, kept in a museum in England. ...

More here

Natural History Museum of Utah Opens

The new Natural History Museum of Utah will finally get its chance to show off.

It will open its doors to the public on Friday, Nov. 18. The museum is located in the Rio Tinto Center, adjacent to Red Butte Garden at the University of Utah.

With more than 1.2 million objects in the collection, the museum represents all 29 counties in the state.

Of those 1.2 million items, the museum will display 3,600 in 10 galleries.

More here

Mathers Museum Merges with Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology

Sarita Soni, Indiana University associate vice president for research and vice provost for research at IU Bloomington, has announced a reorganization of two cultural institutions on the Bloomington campus. The Mathers Museum of World Cultures and the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, both supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at IU Bloomington, are merging, bringing together important collections of millions of archaeological, anthropological and historical materials.

More here

Washington’s Textile Museum Moving

Washington’s Textile Museum, with its collection of objects from clothing to quilts and rugs, is moving to the campus of nearby George Washington University.

Officials at the university and museum plan to announce the move Tuesday afternoon. The plan is for the collection to be part of a new museum expected to open at the university’s Foggy Bottom campus in 2014. ...

More here

Funeral for a Friend

The Save America's Treasures program has been a huge help in the world of museum anthropology -- and now it is gone ...

Dear Friends and Fans of Save America's Treasures:

We write with great regret and a heavy heart to update you on Save America’s Treasures. As you will see from the memo below from Stephanie Meeks, President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, we were informed late last week that Save America’s Treasures will officially close as a program of the National Trust on June 30th. With the program's termination, our positions also will be eliminated.

For the past year and a half, since February 1, 2010 when we first learned of the Administration's puzzling decision to end the federal Save America's Treasures program, we have worked tirelessly with our Trust colleagues, federal partners and countless friends on Capitol Hill and across the country to ensure the program's survival. Throughout these challenging times, the hundreds of letters of support and offers of assistance we received from you boosted our spirits and strengthened our resolve. You should feel proud that this joint effort was a success and our voices were heard. With SAT's broad bi-partisan support, the House voted last August to re-instate SAT for 2011, and the Senate was poised to follow suit.

Unfortunately, as you know, a 2011 budget was not passed last year, and our federal funding fell victim to a new Congress and the ensuing budget battles. Because the President's budget did not include SAT for two years in a row, and Congress has decided against reinstating any programs the Administration has eliminated, Save America's Treasures will not be funded in 2012, either. Although we presented a variety of creative solutions to develop a fully-private program, the National Trust decided it could not maintain SAT without federal support.

This decision is disappointing and sad on many levels-- the end of a bright era in preservation, and for us personally. It has been an enormously rewarding 12+ years and a true pleasure and privilege to work with you, helping facilitate your incredible efforts to save our nation's rich heritage. We count our long-standing partnership and friendship with each of you as a highlight of our tenure at the Trust, and we hope our paths will cross again before too long. Our personal contact information is below, along with that of key representatives from our federal partner agencies for any ongoing SAT-related business.

In the coming months, the National Trust may invite you to participate in some of their other programs and activities. This is a challenging time for those of us concerned about the protection of our country’s precious cultural resources, but with the steadfast commitment you and so many others have shown over more than a decade, we are confident that better days lie ahead.

While the National Trust’s SAT program soon will be a memory, we share with you a proud legacy of treasured places we helped save. Keep up the great work, keep in touch, and thank you again for all you continue to do to ensure a brighter future for our past.

With warmest regards,

Bobbie Greene McCarthy, Director and Fiona M. Lawless, Program Manager
Save America’s Treasures at the National Trust for Historic Preservation

P.S. We will be at our usual posts until June 30th, so please don’t hesitate to call if you have questions or would like to discuss this further. After June 30th we can be reached as follows:

Bobbie Greene McCarthy- cell: (301) 938-9931
Fiona M. Lawless- (301) 523-2724 or fionalawless@comcast.net or look me up on Facebook!

Federal agency contacts for ongoing SAT-related questions:

Hampton Tucker, Chief, Historic Preservation Grants Division
National Park Service
(202) 354-2067
Hampton_Tucker@nps.gov

Kimber D. Craine, Director of Program Initiatives
President's Committee on the Arts & the Humanities
(202) 682-5661
kcraine@pcah.gov

Connie Bodner, Ph.D., Senior Program Officer
Institute of Museum and Library Services
1800 M St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 653-4636
cbodner@imls.gov

Michael McLaughlin, Leadership Initiatives Coordinator
National Endowment for the Arts
(202) 682-5457
mclaughm@arts.gov

Mary Downs, Senior Program Officer
National Endowment for the Humanities
(202) 606-8456
mdowns@neh.gov

Yale Peabody's Collections Online

Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale¹s museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new 'Open Access' policy that the University announced today.

Yale is the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible in this fashion, and already more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog: http://TinyURL.com/4x2x2f3

The goal of the new policy is to make high-quality digital images of Yale¹s vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. [Read here]

Revitalizing Museums as Centers of Ethnographic Research

Museums have for centuries played an key role in managing the materials that define the myriad of cultures – past and present – around the world. And many of them have, over time, accumulated a lot of materials. The public displays in established museums, for example, usually feature only a tiny fraction of their collection ... [Read more here.]

True's Inconclusive End

Her side of the story ...

The trial of Marion True, the former antiquities curator of the Getty Museum (which for many years has been one of the leading collectors of world-class antiquities), for conspiring to receive antiquities that had been illegally excavated and exported from Italy, began on 16 November 2005. The Art Newspaper has been covering the trial since its outset. Until March 2009, the prosecution worked through its case, and then the defence began cross-examining witnesses, but True has had no opportunity to present her case directly. Here, she tells The Art Newspaper about the trial and its outcome. [Read more here.]

MOACAT

We finally had a chance to peruse the the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia's online catalogue (MOACAT). A great resource and it gives lots to think about in terms of effectively and efficiently getting collections online.

Check it out here.

New Director, New Directions for Hearst?

A long article on the new director, Mari Lyn Salvador, at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, and the directions the museum may go. A variation here on the New York Times website.

Havasupai & ASU Settlement

For those museums with biological samples and those researchers tracking trends in intellectual property rights, the Havasupai and Arizona State University conflict is an important case study to consider. Good articles to read in the New York Times and Indian Country Today.

Top 10 Heists

A historically fascinating (we were going to write "fun" but that's probably not a good word choice ...) compilation of the "Top 10 Art Heists of All Time." If nothing else, something to talk to your museum's security officers about!