A Tale of Two Meetings - Week 7

This week at the CHF Museum we had two big meetings take place! The first was an oral history workshop set up by the collections manager, Stephanie Lampkin, for the museum team. The workshop was an informal meeting where we had a discussion about the proper methods for conducting oral histories with Lee Berry; a program assistant in the Center for Oral History at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The workshop came together after Stephanie and Lee had a discussion about the possibilities of the Museum Team conducting oral histories with artifact donors. This idea is wonderful because there are times when a donor gifts an object to the museum that they used or created themselves, or have a personal connection with the original owner of the object. If a collections manager has the skills and knowledge to conduct an oral history with the donor, it could become an essential  piece of the donation. The oral history accompanying a donation could be an explanation of how to use the object, a life history, or even a history of the object. These oral histories could be filmed, thus presenting the opportunity for a video exhibition alongside the object! The oral history workshop was a great way to reconnect with the skills I learned during my first semester of graduate school and apply them to my work now.

One piece from the Pharmaceutical Collection
Photo Courtesy of {Sarah Sutton}

The second meeting of the week was with the collections staff of the Mutter Museum. Talk about worlds colliding! Having the opportunity to bring together my old friend from the Mutter Museum with my new team at the CHF Museum was a dream come true. The focus of the conversation was the Pharmaceutical Collection at the CHF. I have mentioned this collection in previous blog posts, and we called on the Mutter Museum to have a conversation about the best practices and methods to correct the problems the CHF Museum has. We discussed proper storage of pharmaceuticals, legal issues, and plans for the future. It was amazing to see a conversation among two institutions with collections that seem to vastly different, but actually meet somewhere in the middle with this pharmaceutical collection. One topic that came up and stuck out to me the most was the testing and sampling of museum collections. The question came up about researchers wanting to test and take samples of the pharmaceutical collection. Should the museum break the seal of an unopened bottle of cough medicine from 1902 for a researcher or scholar to chemically test the contents? Would this be irreparably damaging the artifact, or is this the purpose of museum collections? Are museums here to serve the educational and research needs of scholars and the public, or do they exist to preserve these artifacts for the future? Although I don't have the answers to any of these questions, the conversation had between two museums this week was inspiring in surprising ways.