Recently Chris and I ventured to the Canadian Museum of History to catch the temporary exhibit, “Medieval Europe: Power and Splendour” before it closed. In a past undergraduate life I actually was a bit of a medievalist, so I was pretty interested to check out this exhibit.
Yesterday Chris and I took advantage of the beautiful long weekend to take in one of the last days of the Butterflies in Flight exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and let me tell you, this one was really quite magical.
Continue reading “Exploring Exhibits: Butterflies in Flight at the Canadian Museum of Nature”
Lately I’ve been looking through newspaper clippings to try to find anything I can about the national museums of Canada. In one of my online expeditions, I came across a clipping titled: “Keenly Interested in Fish Culture: Children So Numerous Lecture Given Twice.” Yes, you read that correctly.
Continue reading “Research Ramblings: Having a Conversazione at the National Museum of Canada”
I’ve been spending some time digging through the online archive for The Ottawa Journal recently, and I have to say that I’ve stumbled upon some pretty fun columns. One of the first ones to catch my attention was published on May 27, 1886. It provides an account of an address given the previous night by Sir William Dawson to the Royal Society of Canada. Dawson suggested that it would be an advantageous idea for Ottawa to have a National Museum. Considering that there are now four directly in Ottawa and another just across the river in Gatineau, I’d say he was probably on to something….
Continue reading “Research Ramblings: OPINION Ottawa should have a National Museum.”
It has been a few weeks since I posted the original story, and since that time I have been able to do a little more digging – or rather, enlisted the help of professionals in the collection!
I got in touch with the Canadian Museum of Nature Library staff to try and find out the answers to the questions I still had at the end of the first installment of this story. I still don’t have all of the answers, but I think I’m getting a little closer. I was put in touch with the Archivist, the Curator of the Vertebrate Collection, and an Assistant in Collections Services, who kindly and enthusiastically put their skills and knowledge to work for me.
It should be no secret at this point that I basically live and breathe museums and want to know everything about how they work while working in and for and about them. This is how this story began. I decided to start using my free time to go to Library and Archives Canada to collect everything I possibly could that pertained in someway to Canada’s national museums. Collecting broadly and without a particular focus, I was open to whatever stories presented themselves to me and caught my attention. One of the first files that I collected was titled simply, “Specimens of wood bison for Victoria Memorial Museum.”
Continue reading “Research Ramblings: Tracking the Buffalo Exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Nature”
Presenting Past 