Bored now.
My neighborhood mammalogist showed a video about white-nose syndrome (WNS). WNS is wiping out colonies of bats at an astonishing rate. She was openly crying during the video, which showed heaps of dead bats, and dying bats fleeing their hibernation site in the midst of winter to freeze in the snow. Dr. Sledge, with a heart of stone, was thinking, “Yep. That’s another dead bat, all right. There’s another one. Yeah, that one’s dead, too.”
I realized that’s how the general public views mineral museums. Yep, that’s another rock, all right.
I can tell you what is in most mineral exhibits without walking into the museum: UV fluorescent minerals, pretty things from various places in the world, “mining is your friend”, and more than likely, displays of minerals arranged by Dana’s System of Mineralogy, usually giving the chemical formulae. Maybe some gold if gold mining was big in that state’s history. You can look at pictures from the early 1900’s and see that this format has changed little in the intervening years. From this, laymen or kids will learn, “Yep, that’s another rock, all right. “ It’s now 2012, and mineral museums now can bore even me.
You will find nothing about the vast amount of information that minerals represent. There will be nothing about the amazing array of near-magical analytical instruments that are used to access this information. There’s nothing about the ingenious methods of experiment and crystal growth that make mineralogy and petrology empirical sciences. In short, there are fabulous stories that are not being told. We are losing prospective students and geoscientists by failing to hook them and hold their attention.
There are some standout museum exhibits on minerals and geology. Fifteen years ago, the Smithsonian redesigned its Earth Science exhibits, with some surprisingly well done exhibits, but with most of the minerals in a fairly standard display format. This was described by a former Smithsonian curator as “nearly perfect”. The Smithsonian has the collections to support truly stunning and world-class displays, but you can stand in the Hooker Hall of Gems and Minerals and watch the crowds stream past without stopping to look at them. The tourists are on their way to the Hope Diamond. There are some very well-done videos and interactives, but few watch them. By standing in the middle of the way and staring up at an excellent video on mineral color, I was able to get others to stop and look up, and watch.
The American Museum’s Hall of Planet Earth took a radically different approach that is a credit to exhibit design, bringing famous outcrops to NYC. HOPE incorporates some very well done exhibits on the living earth, not just static mineral exhibits.
The Houston Museum of Natural Sciences offers the experience of fabulous minerals as art objects. When I visited, Ella Fitzgerald was playing, the room was darkened, with beautifully lit minerals, and luxurious red carpet. The collection was world-class by any standards. Even so, for most of my visit I had the place to myself. Professor Frank Hawthorne, an exceptional Canadian mineralogist, showed up later. That made two of us.
Why is geology/mineralogy exempt from good and inspirational exhibit design? There’s problems with every aspect of the process. Exhibit designers generally know nothing about the geosciences, have bad memories of it from college, and oooooooo did someone say dinosaur? Anything that might appeal to an audience over the age of 12 is very difficult for an exhibit designer to cope with, not because of their intelligence or lack thereof, but because that is the demographic for which they have spent their careers designing. Anything that might involve math, chemistry or other hard sciences is generally anathema to an exhibit designer/developer. Geology and mineralogy, on the other hand, incorporate math, chemistry, physics, and all the other hard sciences. The geosciences are excellent gateways to the other hard sciences, and that’s where the exhibit development lies.
Part of the reason for stagnant exhibit design is that our friends are bad influences. Mineral museums, in their present format, tend to be dependent on collectors, who want nothing more than to see their precious collection displayed in the pretty-rocks-on-a-velvet-pillow format. Space could be devoted to the stories the mineral represent, but the space required for that is crowded out by the need to cram in more minerals. Another part of the reason is money. Static exhibits are cheap to build and cost little to maintain. There aren’t many sources of funding for geology museums, and most businesses want to purchase something favorable to themselves. We need some different friends.
In addition, the pretty-rocks-on-a-pillow display is hallowed by time and practice. It’s what a lot of rockhounds and collectors genuinely want and expect. I ran into this attitude when I took my current job. I was happy that geology was spread out in the Museum, incorporated in all the different places where it was applicable to the story being told. Rockhounds were furious that we didn’t have a separate Hall o’ Pretty Minerals On A Pillow. A lot of them still haven’t gotten over it, even after I wrangled a major donation of new minerals and got them on display. From this I learned that novelty is not always desirable; if it were, bluegrass, baseball, and classical music would be dead as doornails. But rockhounds are not only audience that we need to serve. There are much larger populations that need an introduction to what we have.
There are possibilities of salvation. Robert Hazen’s new way of looking at mineral/biological co-evolution with time provides a new and interesting framework for a mineral museum. Mineralogy can be successfully integrated with the other sciences as it was in our Museum. The rocks are an essential part of every science story on this planet.
Until then, mineral museums disappoint me on a regular basis. Yeah, that’s another pretty rock, all right.
drsledge 