Finca Vigía , Hemingway’s home in Cuba

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Photo via Matt Brooke Studio.

The Finca Vigía Foundation was founded in 2002 to preserve Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban home, Finca Vigía. After living there for over 20 years and composing two of his most famous works there, Hemingway left Finca Vigía in 1960. He probably intended to come back, because items such as pens and were left as he had used them. After his death in 1961, the Cuban government claimed ownership of the property.

Today the property is run as a museum and the house and many of the objects within are being preserved due in large part to the Finca Vigía Foundation. The Foundation has worked with the Cuban government (a rare example of collaboration between the Cuban government and a US institution) to maintain and restore both the house and the objects within, including over 3,000 documents and 9,000 books.

By 2010 3,000 documents had been conserved and digitised, and copies are now stored at the Consejo Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural in Cuba and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where it was added to a collection of personal papers Hemingway’s wife had retrieved from Cuba in the late 1960s. While the Presidential Library has useful finding aids on its website, none of items that form the Hemingway collection appears to be available through the website. Likewise, it seems the Consejo Nacional has not made its copy of documents available online.

Among the next projects of the Foundation is a concerted effort aimed at preserving Hemingway’s Cuban library. Many of the books include marginalia and will be of interest to Hemingway scholars. Information about the books is also unlikely to be online. In fact, access to the museum itself is very limited; visitors are only able to view the rooms through windows. Entry to the house is not permitted, and no doubt any future researchers may have to work quite hard to gain access to the books. It seems photography is permitted, though.

Not surprisingly, few Cuban archives or resources are available online. However, the University of Miami has a Cuban Heritage Center, and a number of the collections can be accessed online. A guide to Cuban archives has also been published, and a digitization project for 19th century Cuban newspapers is underway.

Marianne Moore

Image courtesy of WikipediaImage courtesy of Wikipedia.

Marianne Moore was a Modernist poet who had a particularly keen eye for the details of the physical world as a trained biologist (The same skill may have been handy while she worked for Melvil Dewey’s). Much of her poetry describes natural objects (particularly animals) from a slant perspective, providing a different way to think about physical objects. Some of her most famous poems include “The Pangolin”, “Fish” and “The Steeple-Jack”. Her interest in the physical world makes it particularly appropriate that Marianne Moore’s presence online is almost entirely limited to digital versions of her published poetry.

The most significant collection of her papers is held by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. The Rosenbach has more than just her papers, though: the museum also includes a recreation of Moore’s living room. There are overflowing bookshelves, comfy chairs, and all the papers that are present in the home of an active poet. However, her papers have not been digitised, and few pictures of the living room are available online.

Moore’s letters are scattered throughout several institutions, predominately along the U.S. Eastern coast. It appears, however, that few or none of these collections have been digitised, though a project at the University of Michigan is aiming to change that.

If you would like to read some of Moore’s published poetry, much of it is easily accessible online. There are also recordings of her reading her work available. For a short time, Moore also edited The Dial; digital versions of the magazine are available here.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, California

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Image of the Idol of ‘Fombum’ courtesy The Museum of Jurassic Technology.

The dissonance created by the juxtaposition of “Jurassic” and “Technology” seems to be representative of the experience of visiting this museum. Firsthand accounts include a questioning of sanity and the assertion that “[t]he museum was larger inside than out”.

As noted in the Introduction to the Museum’s website, “[i]n its original sense, the term "museum” meant a spot dedicated to the muses - 'a place where man’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs.’“ The Museum claims to trace its roots to the nineteenth century and to stand today "in a unique position among the institutions in the country,” a statement which is certainly true - one would have difficulty finding any other exhibit devoted to, for instance, the Deprong Mori, a bat native to “the Tripiscum Plateau of the Circum-Caribbean region of Northern South America” which is reputed to have the ability to fly through walls, or a collection of the works of violinist and microminiaturist Hagop Sandaldjian, including a Little Red Riding Hood tableau carved into the eye of a needle and the figure of a woman carved on a strand of the artist’s white hair, or a series of letters to the Mount Wilson observatory from individuals claiming to be in posession of “the key to all existance” [sic].*

According to Roadside America, the Museum of Jurassic Technology was founded in 1989 by artists David and Diana Wilson as an “educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” This 1996 story from National Public Radio on the Museum comments on the authoritative tone of the displays: “that voice of unassailable institutional authority – you know: the voice from every museum acoustic guide and nature special”. In an interview with David Wilson called “The Museum museum,” Frieze magazine notes that while touring the MJT “one may begin to doubt the veracity of this particular museum, and this doubt may spill over to museums in general.” It is still unclear to us, however, whether this is a museum of fictions, or a collection of authentic artifacts presented in an unfamiliar way. What is clear is that the Museum of Jurassic Technology provides not just an assembly of arcane “facts” but a multisensory user experience - that its physical location may be just as important as any information contained therein.

Click here for a list of the Museum’s Collections and Exhibitions, and here for visitor information including location and visiting hours. We reblogged another review of the Museum of Jurassic Technology last week.

*I am really not sure how many, if any, of these are hoaxes.

#Macclesfield Silk Museum

Silk museum exhibit

Image courtesy of Red Oaks Farm.

The Macclesfield Silk Museum is dedicated to the silk industry in Macclesfield, Cheshire, which was at one time the world’s biggest producer of finished silk.

While the far East is traditionally thought of as the home of the silk industry, silk weaving made its way to England via France and China in the late 17th century. It maintained a strong presence in the textile industry for centuries and continues to contribute to the industry today. Macclesfield in particular has long been a hub for the trade (This is why the football team are called The Silkmen.)

The museum celebrates the history of the town’s silk industry and silk production in general. It is comprised of the Heritage Centre, the Silk Industry Museum and Paradise Mill Silk Museum, which are integrated to make a cohesive collection.  The Heritage Centre describes how the silk industry arrived in Macclesfield and includes some samples of work, ranging from fabric swatches to full Victorian dresses, produced in the city. The Silk Industry Museum takes a narrower focus, describing what a Macclesfield weaver’s life might have been like, while Paradise Mill contains the traditional machinery and includes a demonstration of silk weaving. A full description of the museums is available here. The museum also includes a library and archives service, which are also used as a library for the Silk Association and Macclesfield School of Art.

While the Silk Museum has a website which provides some information about upcoming exhibitions, it appears there is no online photo gallery or interactive tour.

Tattooed Human Skin at the Wellcome Collection

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Image courtesy Wellcome Library/Wellcome Images.

At the first-ever Museums Showoff on 25th April 2012, Gemma Angel made a brief (9-minute maximum!) presentation on the subject of her doctoral research - a collection of tattooed human skin found at the Wellcome Collection in London. This particular collection consists of about 300 pieces of human skin, probably French in origin, created between 1850-1920 (as little is known about the collection, we must assume all dates are approximate). This collection is Angel’s research subject as a PhD student at University College London.

The exact origin of the specimens in the collection remains something of a mystery; all 300 pieces were obtained from a “Dr. La Valette” in Paris in 1929. The purchasing agent wrote of the transaction:

These skins date from the first quarter of last century down to the present time; many of them are very curious and extremely interesting, consisting of skins of sailors, soldiers, murderers and criminals of all nationalities … Lavalette told me that the skins are unique, that no more could now be got under any circumstances and that each skin had taken him a long time and cost him a certain amount to cure and prepare for his permanent collection.

Quoted in “Current Research”, Life & 6 Months.

Little is known about La Valette, but why would anyone feel the need to assemble such a seemingly macabre collection? The reason was likely scientific: as Angel pointed out at Museums Showoff (and in this 2010 blog post), tattoos were of interest to some nineteenth-century criminologists as examples of “signs of atavism, criminal proclivity, or dangerous ‘degeneration’” within European society. The collection of actual skin, however, as opposed to sketches or photographs, certainly gives one pause.

Two pieces are on permanent display as part of Wellcome’s Medicine Man exhibit, and seven more were available for public viewing in Wellcome’s 2010 exhibition, Skin. A number of photos of the pieces can be found on Gemma’s blog and elsewhere - so why claim that these aren’t online? First, because the digital images represent only a fraction of the collection, and second, as with most museum artifacts, surely nothing can replace the handling of the actual thing. Especially when the artifact is made of a substance, which, according to some, is unmistakable.

Bethlem Royal Hospital

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Image courtesy Royal College of Physicians.

Bethlem Royal Hospital (originally St. Mary’s of Bethlehem) in London is one of the oldest hospitals in the world dedicated to the treatment of mental illness. Originally founded in 1247, it gained such a strong reputation that its nickname of Bedlam soon entered vernacular English as a synonym for madness and lunacy.

The hospital has extensive archives, and only a small number of items have been digitised.  The hospital is a deposit point for the National Health Service and  holds the archives not just for Bedlam, but for several other hospitals in South London as well. Contents range from a record of religious services held at hospitals to the more expected patient casebooks. A brief list of the different categories of information held in the archives is available as part of the online catalogue. It includes manuscripts as well as photographs and some realia. Items such as casebooks suggest that there are some practical reasons for the collections being left offline – some items are still closed access due to confidentiality laws. However, the majority of the archives are accessible in person.

There are also two other collections associated with Bethlem Royal Hospital: a museum and a gallery. The museum includes objects from the history of the hospital and the gallery showcases art by artists “who have experienced mental distress from across South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.”