Developing from the principle of democratising collections, there is an increasing call to turn museum open storage into places for visitors’ learning. Much of the existing literature has suggested that encountering huge collections without interpretation or guidance can be overwhelming for visitors (Dawes, 2016; Slater, 1995). However, an emerging counterargument suggests that open storage without curation empowers visitors to explore the area freely and enjoy unexpected encounters with objects within vast collections (Bond, 2018; Keene, 2005, Thiemeyer, 2017). Using a case study of the Open Store in the National Railway Museum (NRM), York, this paper examines the potential for embodied learning in open storage seen through the lens of contemplative wonder (Schinkel, 2017, 2020). It argues that contemplative wonder is an important learning tool with strong affective power and the ability to stimulate imagination. Using qualitative data gained from adult visitors through accompanied visits, personal mind maps and interviews, this article demonstrates that the distinctive characteristics of museum open storage can indeed evoke visitors’ contemplative wonder. The visit experience had strong affective power and stimulated visitors’ imaginations. The potential of contemplative wonder for learning is evident since it encouraged visitors to connect to their personal experiences, generate questions, and exhibit reasoning and expressing a view on world development. Interestingly, this study also found that in the setting of museum open storage, feelings of confusion and being overwhelmed were always found when visitors experienced contemplative wonder, leading to the conclusion that these two feelings are not necessarily hindrances to visitors’ learning as existing literature suggests.
Siobhan Angus reviews Photography, Ecology, and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives by Bergit Arends.
In 2022, the ashes of Preben Holger Larsen were repatriated to Denmark, and interred at the Mindelunden Memorial Park on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Larsen was a member of the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation of Denmark during the Second World War, and for this was imprisoned at Neuengamme Concentration Camp in northern Germany, where he was killed in 1944. However, after the end of the war, Larsen was listed on a Memorial at Mindelunden for those Danish freedom fighters whose remains had never been found. Larsen’s cremated remains had, in fact, been taken from Neuengamme by Frederick Murgatroyd, a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army Medical Corps, and brought back to the UK. After Murgatroyd’s death in the 1950s, the urn containing Larsen’s ashes, together with twenty photographs from Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen, was given to the former Wellcome Museum of Medical Science in London, and in 1982, loaned to the Science Museum with the rest of the Wellcome museum collection. In this article, we explore how Larsen’s remains came to be in a museum collection, how they were rediscovered and their identity confirmed, and the efforts towards their repatriation. The ethical collections management of human remains in museums is a complex and evolving field, and repatriation is receiving significant attention across the sector. This is an unusual case, but one with important lessons in collections management, archival research, public access to museum documentation, and the review of human remains in museum collections.
This paper reflects upon notions of value for research collaborations with differing stakeholder agendas and suggests modes of working that could be useful to other academic/Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museum (GLAM) collaborations. It focuses on the Railway Work, Life & Death project, a collaboration between the National Railway Museum, University of Portsmouth and a number of other institutions. It demonstrates the benefits that meaningful, long-term collaboration can provide to those involved, and to wider stakeholder communities. It also considers some of the challenges of working with difficult pasts, in this case, accidents which killed and injured many tens of thousands of railway workers, and which run counter to popular perceptions of a 'golden age' of rail travel in Britain and Ireland. These tensions are noted and related to 2025's Railway 200 celebration as both an opportunity and a challenge in terms of telling more diverse stories about the past.
Miquel Carandell Baruzzi reviews Interpreting Energy at Museums and Historic Sites, which discusses the connections between electrical power and political power. The book traces the often-hidden processes of energy generation along the lines of sociopolitical power structures, and considers possible methods for representing this connection in museums.
