Catching up
By: Lynn Grant
Things have gotten especially interesting around here (see my Museum post “Exodus”, from May 28) and I haven’t had a chance to update you on the Tang Horses. Our Chinese colleagues left us on May 28th, having accomplished great things in a very short time. As I told them, they did in three weeks what […]
Electronic Artifacts Dug Up at the Museum
By: Michael Condiff
It’s only fitting that the technology used to do museum research and administer collections eventually becomes an artifact itself. In the I.T. department we are reminded of this on a daily basis as our office constantly takes in broken and antiquated computers and either fixes or replaces them for museum staff. We will occasionally see […]
Secrets of the Silk Road
By: Stephen Lang
I got my first look at the “Secrets of the Silk Road” exhibition now at the Bowers Museum and it looked great! http://www.bowers.org/index.php/art/exhibitions_details/35 The show opens at the Penn Museum on February 5, 2011 so mark your calendars. I took the audio tour which was included with the price and well worth a listen. […]
EMu migration
By: Scott Williams
The Penn Museum has a long history of using technology to help manage our collection. We started our journey toward computerization in 1978, when the museum used a DEC-10 system which could only store the most basic object information (only six fields!). Now, our current content management system, Argus, has hundreds of fields and nearly […]
Reports from the Field
By: Stephen Lang
Well, I’m back after a nice little trip to the west coast. I will be providing some links to topics of interest I found enlightening while at AAM. Hopefully this will shed some light on the current state of museums as well as some perspective on what keepers deal with on a daily, monthly, and […]
The exodus
By: Lynn Grant
In her introduction to the Museum Blog, Amy Ellsworth says, “Now you can follow us through the fourth wall, into our laboratories, storage areas, and offices to see how the Museum works.” Well, this view isn’t always pretty. Take the last week…. Late last Friday, a whole lot of the staff got emails saying that […]
The sites
Tackling the hard parts
By: Lynn Grant
Remember this image from our work plan way back when (two weeks ago)? Well, we’ve now done the fills marked in green and decided that some of the ones marked in red should be green and did those. So, what’s left: the big fills colored yellow here, which we’ve been thinking hard about. The fills […]
The Expo Floor
By: Stephen Lang
Animatronics, wax figures, 3-D movies, live bats, actors in costumes, no this isn’t Disneyland, it’s the AAM Expo Floor! And what AAM conference is complete without it? Where else can you talk to Indiana Jones and then haggle over the price of compact storage units? Or get shown the latest technology in audio handsets before […]
Filling the voids
By: Lynn Grant
Our Chinese colleagues and Julie have diligently filling the minor voids along the join lines in the main segments. They use a mixture of an acrylic resin, glass microballoons, stone powder from a quarry near Xi’an, and dry artists pigments. The results are wonderful, as can be seen in the accompanying example. The joins are […]