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Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.


Good questions!

By: Maureen Callahan

I recently received a very thoughtful email from a reader (a graduate student in a museum studies program) who had some questions about what we do here at the archives — I thought that I would post his thoughts and my replies for our readers’ edification. His email: Hello. I am a graduate student taking […]

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SnowMG!

By: Maureen Callahan

Philadelphia is expecting many of inches of snow, and the weather should start any minute now. It’s safe to say that the city has descended into a full-throated freak-out. So, let’s put it in perspective with some snow photos from the archives! So remember, if you’re going to go out, bring your parka made from […]

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Getting our collections on the web – step one.

By: Maureen Callahan

Non-nerds may want to amuse themselves elsewhere… So, we at the museum are moving to a new collections management system. A year away from data migration, the archives and the collections staff are teaming up to figure out the best way to make sense of our images, clean them up, take care of them, and […]

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Tomorrow’s history… today’s elephants

By: Maureen Callahan

In the archives, we tend to have about a thirty-year lag between something happening at the museum and a researcher wanting to look at those records. However, it’s worth reminding our public that the Penn Museum is actively involved in dozens of research projects, and that the scientists and others involved in this process are […]

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When you’re feeling down…

By: Maureen Callahan

It’s been a week chock-full of crazy here in the archives (my woo-woo friends tell me that Mercury is retrograde, plus it’s been a full moon. If that means anything).  Sometimes, when I’m having a hard day, I go through our database and just try to find cute photos.  So here we are.

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Did you say something?

By: Maureen Callahan

Surely these two guys and a gal have something to say.  Create dialogue for them in the comments section — the most clever (by our standards) will win a prize from the archives. Be sure to leave an email address so that we can let you claim your winnings.

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Stela! Steeeeeeeela! (Can’t you hear me yella?)

By: Maureen Callahan

You’re puttin’ me through Hella! Well, okay, Maya stelae are possibly less immediately dramatic than either Tennessee Williams or the Simpsons. And sure, it’s a different word with a different pronunciation. But the stone monuments in our Meso-American gallery might be my favorite part of walking into the archives in the morning. There’s something about […]

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Summer Vacation

By: Maureen Callahan

Ah, our lantern slide collection. A cornucopia of preservation problems and cataloging head-scratchers. Here’s a sunny image for a rainy day here in Philadelphia: Sometimes working in the archives is like being a contestant on “What in the World?” We’re not experts in any one area, and it’s difficult to figure out what’s happening in […]

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Ta-DA!

By: Maureen Callahan

Guess what! The Penn Museum website has re-launched! Be sure to visit the new archives pages for information about visiting, our collections and our work.

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Turtle Heist

By: Maureen Callahan

We’ve all been told that anthropologists have no right to intervene in the lives of their subjects — does it make a difference if their subjects are small, green, and promise not to tattle? Frank Goldsmith Speck, near the end of his career at Penn, befriended John Witthoft, a young colleague of his. The two […]

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