2009 Conference
Putting University Collections to Work in Research and Teaching
UMAC's 9th International Conference
10th - 13th September 2009, Berkeley, California
Introduction
University museums and collections occupy a critical nexus within the university, serving as they do all of the university's primary missions of research, teaching and public service, which correspond roughly to the user groups of students, faculty and non-academics. Having devoted the 8th International UMAC conference to the public face of university collections, we turn this year to consider their relationships to and roles in research and teaching.
According to the 1952 Polski Slownik Archiwalny - the Polish Archival Dictionary - the archive is:
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an institution called upon to guard, collect, sort, preserve, keep and render accessible documents, which, although they are no longer useful on a daily basis as before, nonetheless merit being preserved."
It is worth considering the relevance of this definition to the status of university museums and collections. The archival role of public museums, their responsibilities to preserve the material heritage they contain, seems clear enough. In the case of university museums and collections, however, the description of being "no longer useful on a daily basis as before" is seldom accurate. Very frequently, the objects held in academic collections are still quite actively used in research and in the classroom. The dividing lines among the accumulation of objects in individual faculty laboratories, departmental teaching collections and fully-fledged university museums are blurry. Indeed, university museums are full of objects, specimens and artifacts that entered the university in the course of faculty research and teaching activities. In justifying the relevance (and in some cases even the continued existence) of university collections, their ongoing utility in relation to the teaching and research missions can be paramount.
We particularly welcome presentations from the full range of university collections: universities are very different from public museums in containing research materials that may be lodged in formal museums, departments, and individual faculty labs and offices, and that span the full disciplinary range of the university. This multiplicity of collections, and the slippage among them, has created challenges and opportunities that may be analyzed and even celebrated as part of the unique culture and history of university museums. How do collections respond to changes in their user communities, to conflicting demands by different user groups, or to changing research technologies? Collections of historical scientific instruments are good examples of artifacts that have shifted from being research tools (in the sciences) to objects of research themselves (in the humanities). How might these sorts of transformations be encouraged? What are some examples of renewed scholarly or scientific activity that have resulted from either new museum initiatives? How can preservation as a primary mission be balanced with active research and providing classroom access? We encourage papers that give an historical perspective to these questions, papers that address instances of current programs, difficulties and successes, and papers that suggest new models for developing the research and teaching potential of museum collections for diverse user communities.
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- Where are university collections and museums placed within the administrative structure of the university? Are they allied to one particular department or discipline, or are they freestanding in their research affiliations? How has administrative placement affected research uses, demands by different user groups, and other functions of the museum? How can collections make themselves more visible to new scholars and students so that they can maximize their research potential?
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- All disciplines change over time, asking new questions, employing new methods and exploring new objects. Inevitably this means that the relationships of material collections to their disciplines also shift. How have these changes affected the research potential of collections? One dramatic instance in recent decades has been the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms of DNA analysis, which have changed not only the nature of cladistics but also transformed the relevance and viability of natural history collections.
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- Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations are now at the forefront of most research, even in the humanities. How have such collaborative research programs affected the use of collections?
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- How are collections used for teaching? Are there accessibility issues that must be solved? In particular, how are they made available to undergraduates for research as well as teaching or display purposes? Are there instances where public or community groups become involved in the teaching or research functions of the museum? How can university museums and collections best convey the findings of current research to students and the general public? Can and should the research mission of a museum be integrated into its public mission?
UMAC's Conference Board 2009 invites participants to give a paper (please see: Call for Papers).
Aldona Jonaitis (USA), Mark Meadow (USA), Nicholas Merriman (United Kingdom), Ing-Marie Munktell (Sweden), Panu Nykänen (Finland), Cornelia Weber (Germany), Song Xiangguang (China)