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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.


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 […]

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The sites

By: Stephen Lang

A bit of a photo dump from the trip so far.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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When sessions go bad

By: Stephen Lang

So far I have had pretty good luck with picking useful sessions to attend at the conference. This can be tricky. It’s really easy to write a title that will get people interested in the session you are chairing. It’s really hard to find three other people who can talk to that issue and give […]

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Other Museums

By: Stephen Lang

Once of the nice things about AAM is that you get to see other museums while you are in a different city. You also get to see how they do things differently. Yesterday we went to LACMA and the La Brea tar pits. Both were pretty impressive. The tar pits were about why I expected […]

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Media stars!

By: Lynn Grant

On Wednesday a team from China Central television came to do a story on the collaboration between Chinese conservators and American conservators, working together to preserve the Tang Horses.  They interviewed everyone but the horses!

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Sessions

By: Stephen Lang

The social tags talk was quite good. It was made up of participants in the Steve Project which allows museums to use their software to let the public tag their online objects. http://www.steve.museum/ These tags can help users at the site find objects that may have been harder to find with only the data in […]

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Day 2

By: Stephen Lang

The first day with sessions. We woke up and got our Starbucks fix and then headed into the LA Convention Center. After picking up our tote bags and badges we started thumbing through the catalog and picking out sessions. Should be fun. I chose social tags and online exhibits and interactions.

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