Crumb duster, lip tickler, ‘mo – call it what you will, mustaches are an ever-present sight throughout human history. Since November is also Movember (a movement to promote awareness of Prostate and Testicular cancer), we decided to get in the mustachioed spirit and post an image a day of some of our favorite mustaches (with [...]
![Graph taken from publication of Libby's Nobel Laureate address, showing Penn Museum's own Aha-Nakht[sic] as one of the baseline known dates.](http://www.penn.museum/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/c14graph-150x150.jpg "Permalink to Willard Libby, Alfred Nobel, and Ahanakht")
How cool is this? While working on a post for our Artifact Lab blog, I Googled Ahanakht, the ancient Egyptian buried in an elaborately inscribed wooden coffin in our collection. Besides learning that Ahanakht I was the first Middle Kingdom governor of the Hare nome (province) in around 2000 BCE, I got a result citing [...]
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 [...]
Maureen: Digitization is iterative. There was a time that every institution with a desktop scanner and a work-study student was scanning every item they could lay their hands on like kids in candy stores, and throwing them up onto the web without thinking much about the user experience. Now that we’re at a point of [...]
The Penn Museum Archives is the proud new owner of How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet by Bamber Gascoigne. What I love most about this book is that it offers the what they call “Sherlock Holmes” and what we call “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach [...]
As far as I can tell, many archivists take a cross-your-fingers-and-pray-like-hell approach to copyright. We err on the side of openness, make a lot of reproductions, and generally feel embarrassed that we haven’t slapped *more* images onto the internet (ergo this blog). If there’s ever a struggle between access and copyright concerns, access usually wins [...]
