Bestyrelsen for Arbejdsmarkedets Feriefond (AFF) har lige offentliggjort deres afgørelse om bevillinger af støtte til en række ansøgere. Medicinsk Museion var en af de i alt 11 institutioner, de fleste museer, som fik støtte her i efteråret.

Vi har fået et tilsagn om tilskud på kr. 4.735.000 til opbygning og indretning af en ny udstilling samt tilsagn om tilskud kr. 605.000 til lønudgifter til en personlig formidler svarende til 70 pct. af lønudgiften i en toårig periode.

Og hvad skal den nye udstillingen så handle om? Det vil vi afsløre her på denne side om ikke så længe …

PS: Lukningen af adgangen til samlingerne gælder kun udlån, besvarelse af forespørgsler, salg af billeder m.m. — dvs. aktiviteter som udføres af det personale, der arbejder med genstandssamlingerne, billedarkivet, arkivet og biblioteket.

De offentlige udstillingerne er fortsat åbne, og der kan fortsat bestilles omvisninger, ligesom auditoriet kan bookes til møder, PhD-forsvar, etc. Her er det ‘business as usual’.

Det voldsomme regnvejr d. 2. juli medførte alvorlige vandskader på Medicinsk Museions samlinger (se bla. her). Det har krævet en stor indsats af museets ansatte og krævet mange ressourcer at få genstande, arkivalier og billeder tørret. Den umiddelbart truende ødelæggelse er dermed afværget.

Nu forestår der et omfattende opfølgende arbejde for at udføre den efterfølgende behandling med at rense og konservere materialet og foretage ompakning, kontrol af registreringsoplysninger og ny placering i sikre magasiner. Det er nødvendigt for at sikre materialet for fremtiden og for at gøre det tilgængeligt for udstillinger, undervisning, forskning og udlån til andre museer.

Opfølgningsarbejdet vil tage tid og vil involvere en række af museets samlingsmedarbejdere. Derfor har vi desværre set os nødsaget til indføre et midlertidigt stop for

• Modtagelse af genstande, arkivalier og billeder
• Besvarelse af forespørgsler af enhver art
• Udlån af genstande m.v.
• Salg af billeder

i perioden 21. september 2011 — 1. april 2012.

Vi vil vende tilbage med nyheder om hvordan arbejdet med at genoprette samlingerne fremskrider.

Vi håber på jeres forståelse i denne ekstraordinære situation.

Mange hilsner

Thomas Söderqvist
Museumschef

Nu har Dansk Center for Museumsforskning fået gang i deres hjemmeside.

Centret er et formaliseret samarbejde mellem en lang række institutioner, der har en eller anden form for interesse i museumsforskning: Center for Naturvidenskabernes og Matematikkens Didaktik, Syddansk Universitet; Det Informationsvidenskabelige Akademi; Institut for Historie, Kultur og Samfundsbeskrivelse, Syddansk Universitet; Institut for Kommunikation, Aalborg Universitet; Institut for Kommunikation, Virksomhed og Informationsteknologier, Roskilde Universitet; Institut for Kultur og Identitet, Roskilde Universitet; Institut for Kunst- og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns Universitet; Institut for Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, Syddansk Universitet; Institut for Miljø, Samfund og Rumlig Forandring, Roskilde Universitet; Institut for Naturfagenes Didaktik, Københavns Universitet; Institut for Psykologi og Uddannelsesforskning, Roskilde Universitet; og Institut for Æstetiske Fag, Aarhus Universitet (associeret medlem) — og med professor Kirsten Drotner på Syddansk Universitet som formand (og initiativtager vil jeg tro).

De forstår museumsforskning bredt som forskning i kunst, kultur- og naturarv samt i formidling af denne arv i forhold til fysiske og virtuelle rum — på museer, arkiver og aktivitetscentre inden for naturvidenskab og teknik. Formålet et at bidrage til “den strategiske udvikling af museumsforskningen nationalt og internationalt”, at “stimulere videnskabelig kvalitetsudvikling ved at afholde workshops, seminarer og konferencer” og at “stimulere internationalt samarbejde mellem centret og tilsvarende miljøer og institutioner på nordisk, europæisk og videre internationalt plan”. Man vil også “udvide de økonomiske rammer for museumsforskning gennem koordinering af ansøgninger til råd og fonde”.

Det er et glimrende initiativ og vi må håbe at centret vil kunne bidrage til at udvikle museumsforskningen i landet og at skaffe flere ressourcer til feltet. Men jeg er ærligt talt skeptisk til ambitionen at “koordinere ansøgninger til råd og fonde”. Det betyder jo i klarsprog at politiske og personlige forbindelser vil risikere at få for stor indflydelse på hvilke ansøgninger, der bliver sendt videre i fondssystemet. For at styrke kvaliteten på dansk museumsforskning burde man istedet satse på konkurrens helt fra bunden. Vi ser samme kedelige tendens på universiterne, hvor en del større ansøgninger bliver produceret ved byzantinske interne politiske processer.

PS: Centret inviterer til seminar i København den 6. oktober — om dramatiseret museumsformidling med oplæg af Ingrid Vatne og Connie Svabo — men desværre er tilmeldingsfristen udløbet.

I’m live-tweeting from the Artefacts meeting in Leiden: see here.
See meeting programme here.
See abstracts here.
You can also follow #medicalmuseion and #af11.

In The Sovereignty of Good (1970) Iris Murdoch suggested that intellectual discipline is moral discipline. She used the learning of new languages as an example:

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. The honesty and humility required of the student – not to pretend to know what one does not – is the preparation for the honesty and humility of the scholar who does not even feel tempted to suppress the fact that damns his theory.

Same with Latin and Greek, chemistry, molecular biology, etc. — these are intellectual disciplines with an authoritative structure that commands our respect. Creativity — which comes from inside — must be respectful to the independent outer world, whether it’s grammar or molecules.

Same with museums. One thing is the curator’s creativity, which leads to new ways of ordering, displaying, and exciting transdisciplinary breaking of boundaries. Another is the restraints set by the material things, the photographs, and the archival documents.

We praise upbeat creative curatorship. But we should also remember to praise curators who handle their material and textual ressources with honesty and humility. Such curators are in tune with reality and help satisfy our hunger for reality. Their work leads them away from themselves towards the things themselves; and a result they probably also help lead the museum visitors away from themselves towards the world outside them.

In fact, museums could be great experiments in demonstrating that there are vast stretches of cultural, social and natural reality that we cannot just “take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal”. Museums would in principle be perfect antidotes to stupid social constructivism (not that constructivism, for example in the original phenomenological sense of Alfred Schütz, was stupid, but that many stupid things have been written and said with reference to it). 

Caveat: I’m wondering how my fascination with Iris Murdoch (which has followed me since I began writing biography) can coexist with my equally great fascination with the aesthetics of medical things? Immediately it looks like a contradiction — but maybe it depends on what you mean by aesthetics?

We all hate blog spam. Spam filters are a blessing — and I’m amazed how efficient they are: I rarely need to weed out the comment folder.

Sometimes, however, my Akismet filter is too efficient, and therefore I use to go through the spam folder once in a while to see if there are any nuggets hidden in the trash. It only takes a few minutes to rapidly browse the spam and I actually rescue a comment (and a potential colleague!) now and then. And it’s also quite interesting to see how the spam content has its own logic over time. A couple of years ago, it was a lot of ads for acai berry juices, last winter it was genital torture that filled the folder, followed by offers for cheap mortage loans. Now it’s back to a classic theme: animal sex.

It’s also fun to see how people try to seduce me into clicking on their damn links. It’s not difficult for me to resist clicking on a comment that wants me to look at images of ball torture with chopsticks. But somtimes I’m tempted by comments which seem to have read the post and write something flattering, like:

Hello there, just became alert to your blog through Google, and found that it’s really informative. I’m going to watch out for Brussels. I will be grateful if you continue this in future. A lot of people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!

(from a site seelling warfare games; sneaky trick, that reference to Brussels 🙂

or:

Please let me know if you’re looking for a writer for your blog. You have some really good articles and I think I would be a good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d really like to write some articles for your blog in exchange for a link back to mine. Please shoot me an email if interested. Thanks!

(from a company selling new car and truck tires).

The history of spam content is a distorted mirror of the history of commercial culture in the 2000s. I really hope some giant database somewhere gathers a representative sample of spam for future historians.

Some years ago, I wrote a pretty critical review of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC. Now the museum has reopened on the new site in Silver Spring, Maryland, a little further north of DC.

The new building features, they say, “a state-of-the-art collections management facility” to house the museums 25-million-object collection (that sounds pretty much, and it’s probably because they have a rather unusual way of counting their artefacts, but nevertheless, their collection aren’t exactly miniscule).

The first exhibits available to the public will feature artifacts and specimens related to Civil War medicine and human anatomy/pathology.

See more on their website: www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum and Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MedicalMuseum.

Watch out for Nina Bjerglund’s new blog on public health science comunication via social media: http://bjerglund.wordpress.com/. She is posting frequently, the content is serious and well-written, and the topic is extremely important — because communication with the general public is a sina qua non for public health research.

Jessica Palmer (Bioephemera blog) is leaving ScienceBlogs to start on her own again. And ends her last post with the classic words ascribed to Dorothy Parker: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity”. She’s so right. Keep up the spirit!