Readings for Thursday Week 4 done 9-26

After reading the first article, it was an outrage to read about what people are doing by taking funeral objects from Native American graves and selling them at an auction. I still believe that the equivalent to what is going on is removing objects and bodies from my ancestors' graves and selling them via auctions. This would make me mad and want to make changes so this would not continue on. It is good to read about the different materials which are being developed and used in order to preserve Native American objects so that nothing will happen to them. This effort shows that curators care about preserving the objects they do have in order to help preserve them for long periods of time. This idea fits into the new museology in that there needs to be more regulations to make sure that museums do not have objects that belong to other groups of people. It was a really neat experience visiting with Melissa Bechhoeffer at the Colorado Historical Society. It was intriguing to learn how she got involved in museums, and became the register at the museum. She keeps really busy recording information and keeping track of a lot of the pieces contained in the collection. I was impressed with the number of collections which come into the museum on a regular basis. I enjoyed learning about the amount of work being done in order to be able to de-accession collections which do not fit in the museum's mission. It would have been interesting to get a feel for what goes on within this type of work. I was really interested in the new building since, it looks like it will be a better facility for the museum. There is the need to have a straight ramp to the loading dock so collections and exhibits do not have to be dragged through the front area of the museum. Also, it was interesting to learn about all of the various collections which have been donated to the museum. The fact that one collection could fill an entire museum is really neat. Also, that there are a lot of collections which are unknown, so there needs to be more processing so all pieces can be identified.