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museum were put in the 1970s. Some curators and critics disputed the value of
making visitor access of the museum heavily mediated by curatorial interpret-
ation, arguing instead for a ‘de-schooling’ of the museum (Illich cited in Ames
1992: 89; Ames 1992: 96). Like Otlet in the early years of the twentieth century,
they placed the emphasis instead on the museum as archive and community
resource.
One strategy associated with de-schooling is the unravelling of the trad-
itional separation between research collection and display collection via ‘open
storage’. Michael Ames sees this strategy as helping to democratize the museum
and free the collection from the interpretative straitjacket which curators place
on it. He has described the approaches to accessible storage introduced in
various museums in Western Canada in the 1970s and 80s. His examples range
from the system used at a university anthropology collection (the University of
British Colombia Museum of Anthropology, where Ames was the director), to
the system adopted in the small community museum of Port Alberni in British
Colombia, and that considered, but ultimately not carried out, at the Glenbow-
Alberta Museum in Calgary. Ames recognizes the practical difficulties associ-
ated with open storage, and the ways in which certain techniques are suited to
different kinds of museum. At the university museum, a system operating a
little ‘like a large library or supermarket’ works well for research and teaching,
while in the community museum, accessible storage accompanied by some
interpretive displays and a simplified catalogue becomes a means ‘for members
of the community to participate collectively in the recovery and documentation
of their own history’ (Ames 1992: 89–97).
I first encountered an open storage system relatively recently at the newly
opened Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum, London. The Darwin
centre is very significant, making an historic reversal of the separation of stor-
age and display at that museum, which was begun in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. As early as the 1880s, when the museum moved to its present site in South
Kensington, a separate and rather evocatively named ‘spirit building’ was built
to house the specimens in glass jars which were considered an unsightly fire risk
(Stearn 1998: 55, 75). Now the Darwin Centre makes many of these specimens
visible to the visiting public, including many type specimens (on the basis of
which species are identified – see Daston 2004b). Meanwhile tours, events,
video-links and webcasts puts ‘behind the scenes’ practices such as dissection
on display. The glimpse behind the scenes of the museum and the sight of the
original specimens collected by Darwin and others can be thrilling, but by
comparison with Ames’ examples, the Darwin Centre remains heavily inter-
preted (mediated), providing very limited and closely controlled access.
As I suggested earlier, today open storage techniques are associated with
democratization, access and flexibility and also with the increased dependence