UCL Museums & Collections Blog

The Grant Museum, technically, is about 185 years old, but one year ago today we opened the doors to our newest manifestation, in the Rockefeller Building’s former medical library; one of the grandest spaces at UCL. Here are some highlights from our first year.

The year in numbers
12884 visitors during normal opening hours
11010 participants in our events
6901 objects accessioned
3121 university students in museum classes
1719 school and FE students in museum classes
96 blog posts
22 specimens of the week
9 journal articles and book chapters published by staff
11 objects acquired
4 co-curated exhibitions
2 floods
Half a dodo went on display (really several bits of several dodos.) (more…)

Storage cupboard with solender boxes that house mounted prints and drawings

Written by Sandra DiRosa

Today marks my fifth day as an intern for UCL Art Museum and although it sounds a little farfetched, I have almost learned far more interesting things in four days than I have learned in three years of university schooling. Instead of learning about art, I am experiencing it up close…something most art history majors dream about! Growing up in New York, the center of the art world, museums were my favorite place to go and interested me far more than any movie, television show or book did. Although I just started working at UCL Art Museum, I have been in London since mid-January and in the time between then and about a week ago my time was occupied by classes. My “Contemporary British Art and Design” class that is offered through my program brought me to numerous museums and galleries around London. I have become fascinated by the curatorial aspect of art and have seen a wide array of styles and set ups: from the British Museum to the White Cube to the London Transport Museum. My interest in museum work has only become greater and now, I am getting a behind the scenes look into a fascinating museum: something I’ve dreamt about my entire life. Welcome to my experience here at UCL! (more…)

A week ago, the Grant Museum had a special family activities day called ‘Humanimals’, part of our exciting, and ongoing, Humanimals season which is investigating the influence that humans and animals have on each other. Our activities gave our visitors hands-on fun with furry, scaly, and boney specimens. One of the activities was a table covered in a jumble of bones from a real skeleton not too dissimilar to ours. The cunning idea behind the slyly educational activity was for our visitors to re-build the skeleton. We had our replica human skeleton standing next to the table for anatomical inspiration. It was so popular that it inspired this week’s specimen. The specimen of the week therefore is: (more…)

If you’re anything like me the most infuriating thing about a delayed or cancelled bus, train or plane is not knowing why said mode of transport was delayed. If my bus was cancelled because a wheel was about to fall off then, hey, I’m happy to wait a bit longer if it means I won’t be getting on a bus that might tip over. But if it’s cancelled because somebody hadn’t realised that four buses were sent out at exactly the same time then, well I’d still be annoyed but less so than just standing in the cold for forty minutes with no explanation. So I’d like to take the opportunity to explain why the Grant Museum still isn’t fully accessible yet.

As you may know we had an extended closure period over Christmas. This was to install glass to the cases around the wall and lighting inside the cases. We’d originally had this planned for the opening in March but due to truly tragic circumstances this didn’t come to pass so we went with PLAN B which was to cover the cases with perspex. This wasn’t an ideal interim situation as it looked a bit unsightly, attracted dust and was inconvenient to get in and out of. Fortunately, our visitors didn’t seemed to mind too much but it was a situation we were keen to improve for access to specimens, security and also for aesthetics. So this is now the second attempt to install glass doors in the museum. It is not an easy space to work with, there are listing considerations and every single alcove in the museum is a slightly different width and height so each door is bespoke to a single alcove. We hate to inconvenience visitors to the museum and planned with all the contractors involved to close for the shortest amount of time possible- hence the prolonged Christmas closure. However, due to circumstances beyond our control the work was delayed by one set of contractors by a week. We’re always looking to turn challenges into opportunities so rather than close the museum for an extra week we opened with everything out on the floor giving visitors the opportunity to see the museum in a slightly different way and as a compromise for not being able to offer the full museum experience. (more…)

If you come down to the Museum today you’re sure of a big surprise.

1000 specimens on the floor

Ever since we moved into our new venue last March we’ve been waiting for the time that we could undertake a very exciting construction project. The room we now occupy was built as a library, and the 39 book cases that run along the bottom row of the Museum’s walls didn’t have any doors on them. We were unable to commission new glass doors in time for the opening so we went with the temporary measure of screwing sheets of perspex in to protect the specimens on display. (more…)

Number 2 in an occasional series highlighting objects from the stores. The first one is here. Hmmmm, I  may need to rethink the title for these posts as after IT STILL COMES FROM THE STORES and IT DIDN’T NOT COME FROM THE STORES it might be hard to come up with the next title.

Just a quick one today reflecting on the kinds of questions that objects provoke curators to ask of the collections they look after. I’ve been working with our documentation assistant on the spirit collection and  I found this curious unidentified object:

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Welcome to the 100th UCL Museums and Collections blog post!!! What an honour! I shall definitely be sharing a wine with scary monkey (see left) later on and he says he gives you all permission to leave work early for the momentous occasion. When you first start writing a weekly blog you suddenly become very aware of time and more to the point, how quickly it whips by! Already it is week four of the new specimen of the week blog. Someone pointed out yesterday it was only seven weeks until the new year. Frightening!

Anywho, this week I have decided to choose one of my most favourite animals to tell you about. It is one of the largest species of the group to which it belongs and famous for its weird appearance. This week’s specimen of the week is… (more…)

This time last year two of the museum storerooms flooded. A loose pipe meant that when the mains water supply was switched on in the floor above, high pressure water jetted into our space, soaking the cabinets that contained some 40,000 of the museum’s objects.

To add to our frustration, the storerooms had only been built a few months earlier. It had taken us two months to install the collection, carefully replacing the specimens’ old locations with their new ones in our database so that nothing would be lost. It took two hours to evacuate all the specimens, and there was no time to document them in our frantic rush to get them to dry land. In this flood, the animals certainly went in far greater numbers than two by two.

This is the start of my latest New Scientist Big Wide World blog post. It’s about the flood recovery, why no natural history museums know what they have in their collections, and things being misidentified in museums. Read the rest of it here: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/bigwideworld/2011/10/lost-information-and-misidentified-opossums-recovering-from-the-flood.html

As I posted on here some time ago, we have a new way of doing outreach in development. A pop-up kind of kiosk that one or two people can visit at a time, with a member of museum staff and one object inside, with the aim of having a much more intense discussion about the object than in our usual outreach sessions, and, more so, issues connected to it. We’re calling it “The Thing Is…”

The kiosk (not the right word but I’m not sure what the right word is: in practice it’s a very large box, beautiful inside) is going to be a great space in which to work, and it will do its job creating an immersive environment in which people can experience something different from any other encounter with museum objects.

But, this week I’ve had worries, doubts and general collywobbles about its portability.

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There was a bit of a buzz in the archaeological community last Friday, as an ambitious project known as the Day of Archaeology took place. Well, there’s lots of days out there: International Days for Peace, Mother Languages, Biological Diversity, Midwives, or World Days for Water, Mountains, Human Rights, and strangely enough, Television (Does it need its own day? Hasn’t it already taken over the world?). Not to mention the International Day of Awesomeness. So why not one for us archaeologists?

A curator's office - think of it as a work in progress.

The event was scheduled to coincide with the Festival of British Archaeology, and encouraged archaeologists from all around the world to write blog posts describing their day. A perfect solution, perhaps, to those people who ask -  ‘So you’re an archaeologist? But what exactly is it that you do?’. Well for one day, the answer was clear, with the chance to shadow some 400 archaeologists across all kinds of careers.

My own day centred around assisting researchers who had come to the Institute of Archaeology Collections to look at pottery, seal impressions, fakes and pastiches and Ptolemaic jewellery, while I wrestled with reboxing archives and European flint – you can see the full details of it all here.

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