[NHCOLL-L:1901] Re: Threatened Collections: one view

[Dennis Paulson]

>Here is the full version of the comment that I provided to USA Today.
>
>Elaine Hoagland

Elaine, thank you for presenting this story so very well.  I hope we 
are able to reverse or at least stop this trend, but that 
anti-intellectual train coming down the track that Doug described so 
clearly has already pushed us to war with Iraq, it's rolling back 
environmental protection and taking away our civil liberties, and 
it's letting the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  It's the 
train of rampant capitalism, and it won't be stopped.  Some days I 
think the only hope for natural history museums would be to sponsor 
network TV shows (soap operas and sitcoms) about their function and 
value and let the Great American Public in as supporters.  But I'm 
not even sure that would do it, as it's so clear that right now our 
government runs the people rather than the people running the 
government.

Museums have tried to enhance the public's appreciation of what we 
do, in particular by the increased emphasis of exhibits over 
research, in some cases a drastic re-emphasis that results in the 
virtual shut-down of the research components, but I wonder what it 
has brought us.  I wonder how effective the dazzling and expensive 
and often interactive exhibits have been in actually enhancing the 
museums' value in the eyes of the public.  Or is this just allowing 
those museums to keep their doors open?

The only thing that is clear is that we do have to turn a lot more of 
our attention, sadly, away from collection research and toward 
collection survival.

Dennis
-- 
Dennis Paulson, Director                           phone 253-879-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History                 fax 253-879-3352
University of Puget Sound                       e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
1500 N. Warner, #1088
Tacoma, WA 98416-1088
http://www.ups.edu/biology/museum/museum.html