If you ask me, there is always something interesting going on in the Artifact Lab, and yesterday was no exception. If you have been following the Artifact Lab blog, you will know that we have been working on one of the mummies in our collection, who we refer to as PUM I. PUM stands for [...]
Recently the Archives department had a request for footage of Morocco, which turned out to be for a film about current day and historic use of water in Rabat. Once again Watson Kintner’s beautiful Kodachrome footage (1951, etc.) has had another outing in the world, this time returned to Rabat where the filmmaker has presented [...]
Within the relative comfort of a 21st century museum, it is easy to forget the sacrifices, challenges, and dedication involved in the discovery of antiquities. All too frequently when we see glamorous vases, sarcophagi glistening with gold, and jewelry enlivened with lapis lazuli, we assume that these objects tell the entire glorious story of both [...]
I ended up in the archives by chance. I was hoping to land a summer museum internship, so I leapt at the chance to work anywhere in the Penn Museum. When I was assigned to the archives, I didn’t know what to expect. I pictured myself looking scholarly, wearing glasses, going through the personal files [...]
What do the world’s best mystery author and the Penn Museum have in common? A lot more than you’d think. Agatha Christie’s books are famous as being some of the most thrilling novels ever. Readers through the generations have relished her whodunits. We sit on the edge of our seats as Poirot twiddles his mustache [...]
Back in the 1980s when video cameras became ubiquitous they slowly made their way around the world, and we started to get videos from indigenous communities in Brazil, such as the Videos in the Villages collective, and productions from native Alaskan people such as KYUK tv. It is an eye opener for audiences to see [...]
Live from the Archives! Film series is announced, with its inaugural screening on March 15th, 2012.
Regular readers of the Penn Museum blog may recall a post about an exciting film re-identification and discovery, in which we realized that the film that we thought was The Kid was really called The Hoax (1932) and that a copy was in the collections of the Smithsonian. By way of University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. [...]
Remember the olden days when you had to wait 3 grueling days to get your precious photos developed? Remember the poor person stuck in that Fotomat booth in the grocery store parking lot? I went to the Archives yesterday for a little light reading from our Historic Structures Report (to confirm whether or not the [...]
Thanks to our digitized and streamed film collections on the Internet Archive, Dr. Mark Rice, a researcher who teaches at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, found a rare 1913 film of which the Museum likely has the last remaining elements (i.e. portions). To quote Dr. Rice: “… Titled, Native Life in the [...]
