Darwin the Geologist

Where do museums come from? Why do people collect things? What can make a collection important? Our best researchers are still puzzled by questions like this but this Saturday the organisers of the Sedgwick Museum’s Curious Collectors day will be on hand to help visitors find some answers.

This Saturday (16^th August) the Sedgwick Museum will give families the chance to join the ranks of curious collectors that have helped build the Museum and discover the it’s minerals, rocks and fossils. Visitors will be able to talk to experts who work at the Museum, take part in creative activities and meet some famous faces from the Museum’s past.

Museum staff have hired and trained actors to take on the parts of Adam Sedgwick, the museum’s founder, Charles Darwin, a young scientist just back from a major expedition, Mary Anning, a self taught marine reptile expert and William Wordsworth, a poet with a deep appreciation of geology. This is the first time the Sedgwick Museum has employed so many actors to take part in a live event. “We’ve chosen quite an explosive combination of characters, even we don’t know for sure how they’ll interact” claim Darwin project sources.

Entry to the Museum is free of charge, as are the activities. The Curious Collectors drawing activity is suitable for families and children of all ages. For more information see www.sedgwickmuseum.org or call (01223) 333456.

Volunteers are vital to the continuing success of many a museum, the Sedgwick Museum is no exception and this week we are thrilled to introduce you to Darwin project volunteer and resident audio guide expert, Victoria Weaver. In this special feature she guides us behind the scenes at the Sedgwick Museum telling us about her work as a volunteer at the Museum and just some of the projects she has been involved with.

Hi everyone! My name’s Vicky and I’m working on the Darwin the Geologist exhibition. I’ve been here since October last year and I come in three days a week. You might think that that’s a bit keen, but I’ve been able to help out with the exhibition from really early on, which is really exciting. Basically, I do lots of the background research relating to an audio guide to accompany the exhibition. I write up what I find and report back to the exhibition team adding my own ideas and suggestions – I like to think that in some small way my work is helping to make the exhibition as good as it can possibly be.

I’ve looked at loads of different things for the audio guide, from national and international guidelines on how to make exhibitions and audio guides accessible to how to organise and run a focus group. I’ve researched different companies that produce audio guides for other museums and heritage sites to see what they can all offer (and how much they cost) and I’ve even had a brief foray into the weird and wonderful world of acting, or rather voice acting to be precise. All this research is important because the Sedgwick hasn’t done anything like an audio guide before, and my job is to gather as much information as possible to help the project team make the best decisions. Two of the most important and exciting things that I am helping with are the organisation of focus groups to evaluate audio guides, and making sure that the exhibition and the audio guide are as accessible as possible.

Focus groups are a great way to get feedback on a huge range of topics because they are more informal than interviews and include a range of different people in a group discussion. They are often used at the start of projects to gauge people’s opinions to a new idea. Because audio guides are new to the Sedgwick we want to know what YOU think of them, and get feedback on a couple of our own ideas including a range of different audio guides and sample audio scripts. We are hoping to run these this autumn, so if you are interested in taking part please get in touch with the museum (you can do this though the website www.sedgwickmuseum.org) and I’ll send you some more information.

It’s important to the Museum that the exhibition is as accessible as possible to as wide a range of people as possible. I got really excited when I was asked to work on this because it’s something I am really interested in. I was asked to contribute to the project brief on access, to make sure that these issues were addressed at the very start of the project. One of the groups I looked at particularly were those with a visual impairment since audio guides can often be especially useful to those who cannot use vision to access museums and heritage sites. I also lend a hand wherever needed, and have helped write one of the Darwin quizzes for the touch screen interactive. I have also written three sample audio scripts for the audio guide. This was great because I got to research some of the specific objects connected to the exhibition and I got to use a huge range of sources including the many thousands of letters that Darwin wrote and received over his lifetime; (he was a VERY popular guy!).

As an archaeologist I’m used to working with MUCH smaller time scales, and I don’t know about you, but I find some of the creatures in the museum REALLY WEIRD. However, this exhibition on Charles Darwin is really interesting to work on. Doing the background research means I got to work on a whole range of different aspects of the audio guide and get to help the project team make the best exhibition possible…Oh, yes, I forgot, I also get to say I work at Cambridge University, which is always nice!

If you’ve passed by the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences lately you might have noticed some major building works in progress outside. For several weeks workmen have been toiling through the summer heat to build ramps to the Downing Street and Sedgwick Site entrances to the Department of Earth Sciences. The improvements will make both the Department and Museum more accessible to wheelchair users.

The Sedgwick Museum has been collaborating with the Department to make sure the changes will best serve our visitors’ needs and are in keeping with the historical building. The project is part of a broader scheme of improvements to access in the Museum funded by the Wolfson Foundation and due to be in place in time for the opening of the Darwin the Geologist exhibition.

Plans include improved lighting and signage outside the Museum, the installation of two platform lifts to improve access to different levels inside the Museum, a hearing loop for the Museum shop, and an intercom for disabled visitors to use to contact the museum with their questions from the Department entrance. The new ramps and stairs are scheduled to be completed by the end of the summer.

To learn more about the Museum’s access facilities, follow this link:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/disability/accguide/facilities/sedgwick.html

Today Sedgwick conservators attempted to reconstruct one of the Sedgwick Museum’s oldest skeleton replicas. Megatherium is an extinct giant ground sloth from the Pleistocene era in South America. An imposing specimen, it has the rather dubious distinction of having the world’s largest pelvis, bigger even than much larger creatures such as dinosaurs.

Megatherium fragments were some of Darwin’s most celebrated fossil finds, discovered on a beach in Punta Alta in 1833. His was not the first fossil of the species to be found but some of Darwin’s Megatherium parts were the first of their kind to be seen in Britain and of considerable interest to the palaentologists of the time.

The exhibition team were understandably interested in displaying an example of this creature. Since the Sedgwick is not in possession of Darwin’s larger fossils from the Beagle collection Museum staff had to cast about for alternatives for the display. Which is when they found this lithograph:

It depicts Adam Sedgwick’s museum as it appeared before it was moved to its current site on Downing Street and features a certain distinctive pelvis and leg.

Although incomplete – a partial pelvis, one leg and a tail – the cast is housed in pieces at the Museum’s stores and is a historic mount that wound have greeted Queen Victoria when she visited the old museum on its opening as well as Charles Darwin when he accompanied his old mentor to visit old friends in Cambridge.

However, piecing together this gargantuan fragment has proven no easy task. An attempt made earlier this week had conservators exhausted and baffled. ‘It looks like some pieces are still to be found and it will take at least four people to hold the metal frame in place while the partial skeleton is fully assembled’ reports conservator Esther Sharp. Another attempt has been scheduled for mid-August.

Once the Megatherium cast has been reassembled measurements can be taken and the design team can decide how best to display these distinctive and fascinating pieces of Darwin and the Museum’s past.

What happens when you gather two classes of eight-year-olds, tell them all about Charles Darwin, then let them loose in a room full of art supplies?

The Sedgwick Museum has been finding out with the help of creative practitioners from Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination. The results of two, day-long art sessions at two different schools will be displayed on the temporary barrier enclosing the area undergoing development for the Darwin the Geologist exhibition.

This Saturday the Museum will unveil the exhibition of children’s artwork inspired by Darwin and his collections. The young artists from St Philips Primary School and Milton Road Primary School have been invited to the museum to see their work on display. Exclusively for our on-line visitors, here is a preview of some of their efforts.

When it comes to collections, things are not always as they seem. This fact was brought home to the staff of the Sedgwick Museum last week when an attempt to shed light on a letter found in a Beagle Collection drawer led researchers to an odd conclusion.

Researchers at the Sedgwick Museum have been digging into anything Darwin-related in the Museum’s collections for some time now, hoping to find specimens and stories to display in the new exhibition. Although most of the hunt involves our petrological specimens from the Beagle voyage - kept in our storage facility in West Cambridge, recent efforts have centred on a lone drawer labelled ‘Beagle Collection’ located in the main Museum gallery.

Unlike the drawers in West Cambridge, this drawer contains almost entirely shell material. Some is fossilised, some is apparently fresh (as of 1835), but unfortunately only some of it is labelled. In this condition, the drawer leaves the Sedgwick Museum with more questions than it answers; What exactly are all the specimens inside? Why are some of them annotated in French? How did they come to be in the Sedgwick Museum?

To help prepare the specimens for display, research fellow Dr Lyall Anderson delved into the history of Darwin’s shell collections and came up with a possible explanation for the specimens’ French connection. According to Lyall, although most of Darwin’s shell material was described by J de C. Sowerby and is now at the Natural History Museum London, these specimens might have returned from Alcide d’Orbigny in Geneva who also identified some samples for Darwin.

The Sedgwick researchers hoped the contents of a letter found in the same drawer might clarify the situation. The letter, in French, in a florid copperplate script was illegible to the staff at the Museum. Luckily outside help was at hand in the form of Dr Yves Candela of the National Museums of Scotland who quickly relayed his findings back to the Sedgwick.

‘First of all when Lyall asked me to translate this letter I went through it quickly but found out as quickly that it wasn’t really relevant to Lyall’s study on Darwin’, explains the French palaeontologist.

‘It is addressed to Dr. A. Gayaux or Gayaur, a surgeon in Geneva. The letter to this doctor explains the problem about Mr Ducruz Marie who has a bad foot. Many attempts were made to cure whatever he is suffering from… It described that many doctors were sought but no luck. The letter is signed Vincent xxxxx (I cannot decypher the surname)’

Although Museum staff are no closer to understanding the contents of the drawer the letter has brought up some interesting questions about the origins of the Museum’s collections - Mr Ducruz Marie probably never knew the part his foot problem played in wrapping Mr Charles Darwin’s fossil specimens.

Today some of the Sedgwick Museum’s youngest fossils were taken out of the Museum for the first time since it opened over a hundred years ago.

To make room for the Darwin exhibition at the far end of the Museum’s ‘Mahogany Wing’ gallery, this part of the Museum has to be cleared. It currently houses the youngest fossils in the collection such as those from Barrington Sands which date from about 100,000 years ago and Burwell Fen which are roughly 4,000 years old, as well as an assortment of archaeological artefacts and general geological ‘curiosities’.

Before the Darwin display can be installed, around 500 of these specimens have to be carefully packaged and removed. After months of photographing, catalogueing and packaging each specimen, Esther Sharp, the Darwin project conservator, drove the first batch of Barrington fossils to our storage facility in West Cambridge this morning. The very first shipment consisted mostly of mammoth teeth. So far about 300 specimens have been moved inside roughly 120 boxes.

To decide on the best designers to undertake the new Darwin exhibition the Sedgwick Museum held a design competition. Last week, after an extensive process and careful deliberation, the winners, Haley Sharpe Design of Leicester, were appointed.

The process began back in November when ten design companies were asked to submit portfolios. Four of these companies were then short listed for interview in February and they were given a design brief to help them to prepare a presentation on their initial ideas for the exhibition.

Dr Francis Neary, Darwin the Geologist Project Manager said ‘the presentations were of a very high standard, many innovative ideas were proposed and they proved an excellent way to assess the merits of each company. It was a very close call between two of the design practices and we had to ask them a series of further questions after the interviews to make what turned out to be a very difficult decision.’

The Sedgwick team look forward to working with Hayley Sharpe to produce an exciting and engaging exhibition.

Today staff at the Sedgwick Museum have finished moving the giant deer skeleton. The ten thousand year-old skeleton whose deconstruction we reported in this post has now been fully restored on top of its brand new base. Scroll down for the first pictures of the Irish Elk in its new location.

Visitors will have to wait untill 2009 when the gallery reopens to see it with your own eyes but staff at the Department of Earth Sciences have been enjoying the new view. They believe it will be well worth the wait.

Before staff at the Sedgwick Museum could begin work on the Darwin displays, a lot of work had to be done in preparation. This story starts at the very beginning of the Darwin project, with some of the problems the museum had to consider before even applying for exhibition funding. Like, how do you make space for a major exhibition in a small museum?

Space is at a premium in our museum and the installation of the new exhibition will require the removal of 500-600 specimens from display. Most of these specimens will be returned to Museum stores, housed in a seperate building in West Cambridge. However a recent assessment of the existing storage space showed that there would not be enough room to accommodate all this material. This report by Dan Pemberton, our collections manager, explains how Museum staff solved this 40 ton problem:

When the Museum applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funding for the Darwin exhibition we included a bid to replace the existing single level mobile storage system in one of the Museum stores with a higher capacity two level system. As soon as the go ahead was given, planning for the replacement racking began.

The store contained approximately 40 metric tonnes of geological specimens. The first problem that faced us was how to install a whole new storage system with no free space to empty the contents of the store into. We went to our suppliers for help and they assured us that it would be possible to install the racking in phases; this would allow us to leave the bulk of the stored collections in place while two racks were temporarily removed to make space for contractors to work in.

We the found temporary storage for the contents of the racks elsewhere in the building and ordered special pallets to fit the building’s less-than-spacious lift so that entire cabinets of specimens could be moved upstairs. Several months of preparatory work were carried out by volunteers who stabilised collections in cabinets so that specimens were not damaged or separated from their labels. Unfortunately we had to close the stores to visitors once the move started.

Many large and heavy objects had been stored on top of the existing mobile racking, these specimens were removed and put into temporary storage.

To ensure that the new racking and existing cabinets would fit in the store we used the not-very-high-tech method of drawing racking and cabinets to scale on graph paper. Cut-outs of cabinets were made so that they could be moved around to make sure that once installed the new racking and the cabinets it was to house would not foul any of the existing utilities. This showed us that the existing lighting and its service conduit in the store was too low and would have to be raised before installation could start. Whilst the ceiling lighting was being replaced we took the opportunity to install some additional wall lighting to the gangway to improve light levels for working in the store.

Installation of the new mobile pallet racking was planned to take place in 10 weekly phases. Each phase took one week to complete, the contractor installed a segment of new track on the Monday and the new mobile rack on the Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday the Sedgwick’s Conservator, Sarah Fineney and I transferred 12 cabinets (each containing 4 metric tonnes of collections) from the old racking to the new. This left Friday for any delays. The following Monday the old rack was removed by the contractors and the whole process began again.

Some of the phases were more complicated since some extremely large display cases had been temporarily stored on top of the existing racking to make a makeshift second level. These were too large to be removed from the store but still had to be transferred from the old racking to the new. Our solution was to hire a manual handling contractor to come in and move these cabinets for us at the right time in each phase, so that they ended up on the correct section of new racking. Trying to timetable the installation of lighting, phasing of racking installation and the movement of cabinets at the right time was a bit like trying to solve a giant Chinese puzzle!

The new racking is now installed and the stores have reopened to visitors. Now we are tranferring objects and cabinets from their temporary locations to the new racking and the first batch of objects from the old displays in the Museum will follow shortly.