Thank you for listening while I processed yesterday's museum date.
I didn't even have a chance to talk about WHY the EFF does this museum (or any, for that matter) still have collections from other countries?!
We walked through the Lohla Amira exhibit, and there is NO REASON for all this African art/craft work to be in this country. NONE. Some village is missing a ceremonial outfit and it's HERE, in San Francisco, in a glass box.
At the @internetarchive a light blinks on their servers every time you use their collections. What a great way to visualise the impact of free access to knowledge. Do not take libraries, museums or archives for granted, we must defend them at all costs! https://www.battleforlibraries.com
The Guggenheim shared 1.2k posts and then stopped posting. Perhaps they just wanted to get share on the #fediverse posts they had shared elsewhere before.
In any case, they only have 7 followers for an account with a huge treasure of images from their collection. Why don’t we all follow them, and boost our favorite images on #followFriday.
I tried to go take a peek at the new leaf cutter ant colony at the AMNH but golly geez... the line was SO LONG. I gotta try to go first thing in the AM.
I'm glad it's popular, though. Every museum can be improved with ant colonies!
@futurebird
The whole setup is some Phase IV futuristic-looking SciFi shit. It's impressive. They included obstacles, barriers and traps for the ants to show their collective smarts in getting around or neutralizing them.
I don't know ants. I imagine aging individuals take on riskier (to themselves) roles, e.g. foraging, defense.
The Museum of Failure is a traveling showcase of spectacular flops such as Coke II, Theranos, Google Glass, and the Juicero. Here's a peek at some of the items on display at the exhibition, which is at Brooklyn's Industry City until June.
It’s great to see more museums, universities, and collectors called out for harboring stolen indigenous artifacts. It doesn’t matter how they came into possession. If their origin is theft, they must be returned.
Is the Metropolitan Museum of Art Displaying Objects That Belong to Native American Tribes?
Only a small percentage of works donated by Charles and Valerie Diker have clear ownership histories. Experts say this could mean objects are stolen or fake.
Meanwhile, the Met has been slow to ask tribes for information about the items.
A bipartisan group of 13 U.S. Senators asked universities and museums with large collections of Native American human remains why they’ve failed to repatriate them to tribes—more than 30 years after a federal law was passed that compelled them to do so.
Senate Committee Probes Top Universities, Museums Over Failures to Repatriate Human Remains
U.S. senators want five institutions to explain why they continue to hold thousands of #NativeAmerican remains and belongings, following reporting from ProPublica and NBC News.
“It’s immoral, it’s hypocritical, and it has to stop,” one senator said.
"Four spears stolen from Kamay, now known as Botany Bay in Sydney, by Captain James Cook, a then Lieutenant, and his crew, are to be returned to their traditional owners after more than 250 years …
"Noeleen Timbery, the chairperson of the local La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council, said she was eagerly awaiting their return after more than a decade of negotiations with Trinity College, the National Museum, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
“I haven’t stopped smiling since I heard the news. To hear that they’re coming back and they’re coming back to stay is unimaginable,” she said from Bare Island, in La Perouse, not far from where the spears were originally taken."
The precise curatorial work of one of our undergraduate student assistants. 💜🪲🥹
(Yes, we are leaving space to accommodate the barcode labels that will be added to each specimen at the time of digitization).
*Coleoptera: Staphylinidae. #beetlecuration#curation#collections#museums#NaturalHistoryCollections