This past Saturday, Chris and I decided to take a little adventure across the river and go to the Canadian Museum of Nature’s open house of their collections storage facility. This is an annual event that I’ve been meaning to go to for years, but this year the timing finally worked out, and I have to say that it was well worth the trip!
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”
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”
This past Thursday my history/museum friends and I checked out the special event Science by Night that took place at the Canadian Museum of Nature. This was a free event that included a variety of fun activities that encouraged visitors to get up close and personal with science and the science experts that normally spend their time behind the scenes at the museum.
Continue reading “Exploring Exhibits: Science by Night at the Canadian Museum of Nature.”
Presenting Past 