ONE EVENING IN 1952, the famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh (1902–1974) came to the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries building after hours, climbed up scaffolding to a platform near the ceiling, and for the last time in his life crawled into the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis, the airplane in which he had made the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The Spirit of St. Louis was hanging from the ceiling of the museum,1 and Lindbergh needed to check the pencil markings he had made on the instrument panel during the journey for the book he was writing about the flight.2 This is one small example of the kinds of research that are done with objects in museum collections. Lindbergh was able to obtain the information he needed because the airplane had been accessioned and preserved in the Smithsonian without alteration.
The public (and even some professionals) are usually unaware of how much and what kinds research are conducted in museums because it is largely hidden from view. As one author has noted:
There is scarcely a major public museum of any kind anywhere whose scholarly staff is not engaged in research and publication in parts of those museums usually inaccessible to the public. The ever-increasing emphasis on exhibiting and fundraising in museums of all kinds continually constrains museum scholars from discharging their proper responsibilities as researchers seeking to add to the sum total of human knowledge, however culturally inflected.3
Scholarly research has long been a museum endeavor, dating back to the cabinets of curiosities of the 1600s, which were compiled to help their owners understand the world around them (collection catalogs were some of the earliest forms of published mu seum research).4 By the second half of the nineteenth century, museums were widely recognized as producers of research, particularly in the United States, because universities were not yet the centers of knowledge creation that they are today.5 Museums were where people went to see new things, to gain knowledge, not just to be entertained.6
One of the first scientific expeditions organized in the United States was led by the Peale Museum of Philadelphia in 1801 to excavate the bones of a mastodon (which were later exhibited in Peale’s museum),7 and some of the most ambitious long-term research programs ever undertaken in the United States have been museum research. For example, the Central Asiatic Expedition, run by the American Museum of Natural History from 1921 to 1930, conducted studies of anthropology, botany, geology, paleontology, and zoology through fieldwork and the study of extensive collections brought back to the museum in New York.8
There are three broad types of museum research: (i) research based on collection objects; (ii) research about the collections; and (iii) research related to museum activities and museum visitors (e.g., learning in the museum, visitor behavior).9 Although the quantity of research done in museums now is overshadowed by that produced by universities, there is still an amazing amount of collection-based scholarly endeavor in museums, ranging from studies of the evolution of life on Earth to detailed analyses of objects and materials. Most museums engage in extensive research each time an exhibit is planned and prepared; some of the findings from this research may be published in exhibit catalogs, in separate publications about particular objects or groups of objects, or in combined publications.10 Collection-based research includes studies on the materials the objects are made of, the historic development of material culture, and object provenance.
Persnickety object registration and long-term care provide the foundation for museum research by maintaining the integrity of the objects in the collections and the information associated with them. Most research done in museums is only possible because museums have large, systematically arranged, and well-documented objects. The collections have unique research value because of the documented history of individual objects, the diversity of objects available to researchers, the order and arrangement of the collection storage arrays (which makes it easy to access the objects and information about them), the deep temporal history of collections acquired over many decades, and because museum collections are well cared for. Going forward, museums must be ever more vigilant about how they organize and archive information associated with collections as this can have a significant impact on collections-based research.11
Perhaps the best-known use of museum objects in research is in natural history collections. Beginning in 1846 Charles Darwin (1809–1882) devoted eight years to an intensive study of more than ten thousand specimens of barnacles, most borrowed from museums (although some came from private collectors). Darwin’s studies resulted in four books on his research and helped him clarify his ideas about natural selection and speciation before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859.12 Scientists still study barnacles in museum collections, including some of the same specimens used by Darwin. Current research based on natural history collections is extremely varied, ranging from ecology to genomics, morphology, systematics, to zoonoses. Because biological collections have been collected over hundreds of years, they form chronological records of life on Earth and, thus, can be used to study such complex topics as climate change and emergent diseases.13
Objects in museum collections may be used for research conducted by artists, designers, forensic scientists, and historians. Collection-based research can reconstruct the history of objects or even the history of the collectors themselves, sometimes using such clues as handwriting, old labels, documents, object supports and containers, or markings on objects. Provenance research is usually thought of as simply tracing the ownership history of objects, but it can be far more intricate and detailed, revealing much about how objects were used, the materials they are made of, and their significance in everyday use. The study of collections can reveal much about the collector, the collector’s worldview, and about heritage and the history of human cultures. Museum objects have been used to elucidate history that was not recorded in written texts, such as that of women and minorities that can be found in depictions of their work, activities, and by the objects they used,14 and to understand the role of material culture in society.15 Studies of collections and how objects were prepared and interpreted are used in the history of science.16 Collection-based research has informed studies of the construction of knowledge, the formation of global networks, and cultural intersections.17 The information associated with objects in museum collections is a significant font of primary source material for researchers, who make use of everything from letters and diaries to photographs, records, field books, and operating manuals. Museum collections are also important sources for genealogical researchers.
Although not directly related to the registration and care of objects, museums often engage in studies of their visitors and how they learn through interactions with objects and with each other.18 One of the first visitor behavior research projects in a museum was a 1924 study by two psychologists who timed visitor behavior in museums in five US cities (among other things, the researchers reported that 75 percent of the visitors turned right on entering an exhibit hall).19 What people do in museums, particularly how visitors interact with exhibits and with each other, is now considered so important that many museums have full-time audience evaluation professionals on staff.20
Ultimately, museum research would not be possible without well-documented, ordered collections of objects that are carefully cared for by dedicated registrars and collections managers. In the course of our duties we are sometimes asked what the most important objects in our collections are—the best response to this question is that the most important objects are the ones that have not been studied yet because they hold the answers to questions that have yet to be asked. •
1. The Spirit of St. Louis was exhibited hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries building from 1928 until 1976, then moved to the National Air and Space Museum.
2. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/spirit-of-st-louis-anniversary/ (accessed July 23, 2019).
3. I. Gaskell, “University and college museums: Some challenges,” Antioch Review 74, no. 2 (2016): 229.
4. P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); O. Impey and A. MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
5. S. Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
6. A. S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970).
7. J. E. Simmons, Museums: A History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
8. R. C. Andrews, Under a Lucky Star: A Lifetime of Adventure (New York: The Viking Press, 1943).
9. K. F. Latham and J. E. Simmons, Foundations of Museum Studies: Evolving Systems of Knowledge (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 59–60.
10. For example, see B. Cohen, The Colors of Clay: Special Techniques in Athenian Vases (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006).
11. P. F. Marty and K. B. Jones, eds., Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums (New York: Routledge, 2008).
12. D. Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006).
13. J. E. Simmons, “Adventures with a time machine: the fascinating past and challenging future of natural history museums,” The Museum Review 3, no. 1 (2018). Available at: http://articles.themuseumreview.org/tmr_vol3no1_simmons.
14. D. Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015).
15. For example, M. M. Andrade, ed., Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2016).
16. I. Podgorny and M. M. Lopes, El Desierto en una Vitrina. Museos e Historia Natural en la Argentina, 1810–1890. (Mexico, DF: Editorial Limusa, 2008). E. G. Hancock, N. Pearce, and M. Campbell, eds., William Hunter’s World: The Art and Science of Eighteenth-Century Collecting (London: Routledge, 2015).
17. D. Bleichmar and P. C. Mancall, eds., Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
18. See Simmons, Museums, 232–234 for a review of informal learning studies in museums; E. Wood and K. F. Latham, The Objects of Experience: Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013).
19. E. P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1979), 167–168.
20. Latham and Simmons, Foundations of Museum Studies, 105.