A Repository for Bottled Monsters: National Museum of the American Indian

Friday, January 30, 2009

Long Tail idea, continued

I've gone on about this topic in the comments to Tim's post from earlier this week, but here's another example from the Smithsonian in today's Wash Post - "Going to Meet Its Public: Indian Museum Will Put Entire Collection Online," By Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, January 30, 2009; Page C01.

This Museum has a built-in lead - they were moved down to Washington recently (in Museum terms) and I'm sure they had excellent records and photos created at that time. When they set up the Museum, they decided to forego exhibit labels in the cases and instead provided a computer screen in front of the exhibit where you could look up what you were actually looking at (I despised this, because only 1 person at a time could look at an exhibit label and I didn't understand why they didn't just put that on the web back then).

So even with a running start, we read "The online project, part of the museum's regular Web site, will begin with 5,500 items and photographs. The goal is to have all 800,000 objects on the Web site, but it will take at least four years to achieve that. ... The museum has raised $750,000 for the first four years of the project, and Gover said a deadline has not been set for the Fourth Museum completion."

So that long tail takes a while to get long enough to trail off...

Who are we?

Mike Rhode was the chief archivist of the Museum from 1989-2011, and is the founder of this blog. I maintain an interest in the course of the museum, and will be posting relevant information.

The Army Medical Museum was founded in 1862 during the American Civil War. After World War II, a parent-child relationship was inverted and the Museum became part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Since then, the Museum has moved around Washington, stopping for years in Ford's Theatre, and on the National Mall where the building it shared with the National Library of Medicine once stood, until it was demolished in 1968 for the Hirshhorn Museum. For 35 years it was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and now is in Silver Spring, MD.

So what about that blog name?

It's historical. I found it in a quote from one of the former curators. World War II confirmed the Army Medical Museum's primary role in pathology consultation. James Ash, the curator during the war and a pathologist, noted, "Shortly after the last war, more concerted efforts were instituted to concentrate in the Army Medical Museum the significant pathologic material occurring in Army installations." He closed with the complaint, "We still suffer under the connotation museum, an institution still thought of by many as a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities. To be sure, we have such specimens. As is required by law, we maintain an exhibit open to the public, but in war time, at least, the museum per se is the least of our functions, and we like to be thought of as the Army Institute of Pathology, a designation recently authorized by the Surgeon General."

After the war, it evolved into the tri-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

A Repository for Bottled Monsters

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Friday, January 30, 2009

Long Tail idea, continued

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