Letter from the Director
For years, one of the first points I have made to visitors is that museum collections are not quite like the boxes in your grandmother’s attic. That is mostly true. Like an attic, a museum collection holds the things a community once decided were worth saving: records of work completed, lessons taught, places visited, questions asked, and discoveries made. The boxes of old tax returns have their counterpart in the residue of past Ph.D. projects. Photo albums and movie reels are not completely unlike the teaching and training materials we preserve as evidence of how generations of students learned their trade. However, unlike a family attic, the EMS Museum’s collections do not belong to a single household. They hold the accumulated history, labor, curiosity, and scientific value of a college community.
