by Jeff Tenuth, Science and Technology Collection Manager
I give a lot of tours at the Indiana State Museum. These are mostly “behind-the-scenes” tours, not gallery tours. Visitors can take themselves through the galleries, but behind-the-scenes tours offer much more.
When visitors come into the museum, they see galleries, attend programs, eat at the restaurants or shop at the museum store. They tend to think that’s all there is to a museum. But in reality, what they see is the end product. Most of the work for the galleries (and programs) is done behind the scenes and the public rarely sees any of it. Nor does the public see the actual size of our collection. The artifacts they see in galleries represent only one or two percent of our total collection. The larger the collection, the more of it is in storage. This is true in most museums. Take the Smithsonian for example. Their collection numbers well over 250 million artifacts. Imagine how big their galleries would have to be to show all of their collections. For a large museum like the Indiana State Museum, we show a few thousand artifacts at one time, but we have hundreds of thousands of artifacts in our collection. It’s simply impossible to put everything on exhibit — we would need galleries the size of football fields! That’s why it’s so important to show visitors and other guests what lies behind-the-scenes. I’ve never had a tour participant who didn’t walk away astonished at the size and breadth of our collection. Only then can the public see what a daunting task it is to care for the largest publicly held collection in the state. With a greater understanding of what the casual visitor doesn’t see, a tour guest usually comes away with a greater appreciation for the collection and what it takes to care for it.
Another reason the public doesn’t see and doesn’t know about the size, diversity or location of the collection is intentional. We do that to maintain the security and environmental integrity of the collection. The collection is actually hidden in eight storage rooms in the Administration building, not the building where the galleries, restaurants and other public facilities are located. The eight storage rooms allow us to store the collection by type of material. (more…)Filed under: museums, tourism | Tagged: artifacts, behind-the-scenes tours, biology, collections, decorative arts, excavation, fine art, geology, mastodonts, metals, paleontology, paper, textiles, toys, wedding dresses | 1 Comment »
As a person who holds a bit more knowledge on certain obscure topics than the general population, I’m sometimes considered a specialist, at least in regard to rocks and fossils from Indiana. That being the case, I often entertain visitors who bring in bizarre objects for identification. Among the most common objects to come through the door are geodes. A fashionable Indiana rock, geodes are mostly found in Morgan, Monroe, Brown, Lawrence and Washington Counties. Most natives of those counties could tell a geode from an ordinary rock, but those of us not born and raised in south-central Indiana often don’t know the identity of these unique natural objects. Geodes are often suspected to be a number of things, including petrified human heads and dinosaur eggs. Unfortunately, neither of these is true. However, they are a minor mystery to geologists.
Indiana geodes originated about 350 million years ago, along with rocks that were deposited while Indiana was underwater (think of a briny middle-eastern tidal flat – very salty and very shallow). The prevailing theory is that geodes originated as an under-sea-floor nodule of the mineral anhydrite. Conditions changed and the anhydrite was replaced, through groundwater flow, by other minerals, resulting in the vast quantity of geodes that we see in only certain rock layers today. By definition, geodes have a hard chalcedony rind, and can either be hollow, with their walls lined by various crystals, or solid.
