Abstract
It is generally a mistake, especially for a historian, to assume that the change personally lived through is somehow more dramatic than that of any other era. All the same, the last thirty years have been marked by significant transformations in the Science Museum’s governance, its public face, its staff structure, and in fact all the different components that the other contributions to this volume have discussed. A single chapter cannot cover the whole range of this era of the Museum’s history, and, whilst acknowledging the wider scene, do more than note that these changes occurred in a period of significant change for all national museums. Instead, this chapter will consider developments in the Science Museum’s continuing dialectic between history and science communication — or, to put it differently, collections and interactivity — which was particularly antithetical in this period.2
This tension, between the wish to preserve and record and the requirement to educate, between the voices of the past and the needs of the present and the future, has formed a continuing thread throughout the life of this Museum. — Neil Cossons, 19931
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Notes
Neil Cossons, ‘Report of the Director and Accounting Officer’, National Museum of Science & Industry Review (London: Science Museum, 1993), p. 9.
John Symons, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine: A Short History (London: The Wellcome Trust, 1993), pp. 46, 48–50.
See, for example, Richard J. Harris, ‘Empathy and History Teaching: An Unresolved Dilemma?’, Prospero 9 (2003), pp. 31–8. It is debatable whether older dioramas in the agriculture gallery, for example, were also explicitly conceived as social historical. For an account of these, see Jane Insley, ‘Little Landscapes: Agriculture, Dioramas and the Science Museum’, Icon: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 12 (2006), pp. 5–14.
Ghislaine Skinner, ‘Sir Henry Wellcome’s Museum for the Science of History’, Medical History 30 (1986), pp. 383–418.
For example, Christopher Lawrence, ‘Physiological Apparatus in the Wellcome Museum 1. The Marey Sphygmograph’, Medical History 22 (1978), pp. 196–200.
The Wellcome Institute’s lead was sometimes seen as a model: J.K. Crellin and J.R. Scott, Glass and British Pharmacy 1600–1900. A Survey and Guide to the Wellcome Collection of British Glass (London: Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, 1972).
Brian Bracegirdle’s catalogue of the microscope collection, researched after his retirement in 1990, was published as a limited edition CD-ROM in 2005: Brian Bracegirdle, ‘A Catalogue of the Microscopy Collections at the Science Museum, London’ (London: Trustees of the National Museum of Science and Industry, 2005).
Ghislaine Lawrence, ‘Charles Drew’s Profound Hypothermia Apparatus (1960)’, Lancet 358 (9280) (2001), p. 514; Lawrence, ‘Hospital Beds by Design: A Socio-Historical Account of the ‘King’s Fund Bed’, 1960–1975’, unpublished University of London PhD thesis, 2002;
Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Robert Bud, Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
David Follett, The Rise of the Science Museum under Henry Lyons (London: Science Museum, 1978), pp. 103–5.
Science Museum Annual Report for 1952, p. 6. For SFA, see T. Boon, Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), pp. 115–17.
Neil Cossons, ed., The Management of Change in Museums: Proceedings of a Seminar Held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, on 22nd November 1984 (London: National Maritime Museum, 1985). Previous Science Museum Directors, including Margaret Weston, had been aware of the tension in efficient expenditure of the Grant in Aid (i.e. government funding) between the need to employ sufficient staff to deliver the Museum’s obligations and to retain enough for expenditure on outputs; she aimed at no more than 67 per cent of the total budget on salaries, personal communication from Derek Robinson, 14 Aug 2009.
Neil Cossons, ‘Scholarship or Self-Indulgence?’, RSA Journal 139 (1991), pp. 184–91, on 185–6. See also his address to the Museums Association in 1982, published as: ‘A New Professionalism [Address to Museums Association, 1982]’, in Gaynor Kavanagh, Museum Provision and Professionalism (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 231–6.
See Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 378.
The initial project team was outlined in the April 1988 circular SMO 19/88, SMD; the gallery opened in the following year. This project is the subject of the ethnographic study, Sharon Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Their Visitors (London, Routledge, 1994, p. 9).
See Tim Boon, ‘Histories, Exhibitions, Collections: Reflections on Medical Curatorship at the Science Museum after “Health Matters”’, in Robert Bud, Barney Finn and Helmuth Trischler, eds Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines (Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999).
Doron Swade, The Cogwheel Brain (London: Abacus, 2001).
Alan Q. Morton, Jane A. Wess, Public and Private Science: King George III Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Robert Fox, ‘History and the Public Understanding of Science: Problems, Practices, and Perspectives’, in M. Kokowski, ed. The Global and the Local: The History of Science and the Cultural Integration of Europe. Proceedings of the 2nd ICESHS (Cracow: Poland, 2006), p. 175, http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet.pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_8/RE_Fox.pdf (accessed 5 May 2009).
See Ghislaine Lawrence, ‘Rats, Street Gangs and Culture: Evaluation in Museums’, in Gaynor Kavanagh, ed. Museum Languages: Objects and Texts (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), pp. 11–32; also see John Durant’s discussion of the issues: Durant, ‘Science Museums, or Just Museums of Science?’, in Susan Pearce, ed. Exploring Science in Museums (London: Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 148–61.
A model close to that advanced for cultural consumption in general in Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Jo Graham and Ben Gammon, ‘Putting Learning at the Heart of Exhibition Development: A Case Study of the Wellcome Wing’, in E. Scanlon, E. Whitelegg and S. Yates, eds Communicating Science: Contexts and Channels (London: Routledge in association with The Open University, 1999).
Andrew Barry, ‘On Interactivity: Consumers, Citizens and Culture’, in Sharon Macdonald, ed. The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 101, 112.
Hilary Geoghegan, ‘The Culture of Enthusiasm: Technology, Collecting and Museums’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2008.
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Boon, T. (2010). Parallax Error? A Participant’s Account of the Science Museum, c.1980–c.2000. In: Morris, P.J.T. (eds) Science for the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283145_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283145_6
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