By Amalia Robertson 05/02/2023
Rob led a talk as part of MAGS (museum and art gallery society) at the University of Leicester end at the of November 2022. The topics of conservation where how Rob ended up working at Sedgwick and his career journey, along with the work he currently does within the museum.
Sedgwick Museum Website: http://www.sedgwickmuseum.org/
Robs Background
Rob has been interested in fossils and the natural world from a young age. He decided to do his undergraduate degree at the University of Portsmouth in palaeobiology. In his third year he decided he didn’t want to go down the academic route of doing a PhD and felt a museum setting would be much more suited to him and still be very hands on with fossils. Therefore, decided to undertake an MSc in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. He found the course very different and had to learn to re-write essays as he had gone from a very scientific perspective to more a humanities and arts perspective.
Rob’s first job was at Peterborough City Museum and Art Gallery, where he was part of the visitor services team. He also did his Museum Studies placement there, which mainly consisted of cataloguing the collections. The cataloguing system used at Peterborough was not a common one. Only three museums in the country used this system. One of them being the Sedgwick Museum.
Right as Rob was finishing his Master’s at Leicester a job opened up at Sedgwick. It was a 6-month cataloguing position. Even though Rob was familiar with the system, and it seems like he would have been first choice, he wasn’t. Rob’s friend (who also did the masters at Leicester) was first choice. But they decided they wanted to stay in Leicester, giving Rob the job. 15 years later and he is still there.
Background on the Museum
The Sedgwick Museum is an earth sciences museum and is embedded in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. Whilst the current museum building opened in 1904, it’s foundling collection is the oldest in Cambridge. “The founding collection was bequeathed to the university in 1728 by a chap called John Woodward. This collection consisted of 10,000 objects. The Museum’s collections are now over 2,000,000 but it’s probably more like 5,00,000 as we don’t count all the tiny specimens and just count the jars”. The University was given some money with the collection the employ someone to look after it. “That money doesn’t look after the collection now, but we know that money was obtained through the shares in the South Sea Trading company”. This means the museum was founded through money obtained through the Transatlantic slave trade. This links into decolonisation which most museums are experiencing today. The collections and galleries still retain their Victorian roots.
The museum has a key role as a teaching museum for the university students. Historically, most of the research on the collections have been by Earth Scientists. Since Rob has been at the Museum, there has been a growing focus on looking more outwardly and increasing more public engagement, “becoming more focused on exploring bigger things to do with museums and society in general. This includes social issues”.
Photo of the outside of the museum (taken by Amalia Robertson)
What Rob has done/does at the Museum
For the first six months Rob was doing cataloguing, “the museum has a roughly 80-year backlog of documentation. Backlogs are not an uncommon thing within museums”. He had targets and deadlines to hit and found it interesting. He got funded for another six months after that.
After this Rob got offered to do a job more interpretation based. The museum cases are full of objects, so he helped make interpretation panels to go on the wall, which took a year and an half.
Close to the end of his contract, Rob was offered another role supporting the rock and mineral collections, “I felt out of depth, scary but I knew the system”.
The museum then got a new director who wanted to get more of the research happening in the museum and department out into the public. Lots of scientists and museums get funding for having public engagement and a public-facing aspects to their projects. This has also benefited with research as more people outside the university have been asking about research and collections.
Decolonization
“A big part of my job at the moment is looking at decolonization and hidden stories within the museum…lots of people of colour (like me) are doing this kind of work as we feel like we need to”.
“Geology museums and natural science museums are kind of at the back of the queue for decolonization. Not many people get emotionally engaged by a rock”.
Museums like the Archaeology and Anthropology museums are very visceral, with distressing images and family heirlooms on display. With Natural History and Geology museums, it is much more subtle and often less visual. It’s about who dug up that rock or fossil in that quarry during colonial times the money come to look after that collection etc.
“There are barriers to break through and how collections were built on the resource exploitation. How and why museums like this exist because they are filled of rocks and fossils that were collected during the British Empire”.
Adam Sedgwick himself (museum named in memorial to) received a lot of money through the slave trade as a trustee of an owner of enslaved people in Jamaica.
Within the collections there is a building stone from Zanzibar, “which was the main port of the East African slave trade, my family are from the Seychelles, which doesn’t have an indigenous population. People who lived there were French merchants and enslaved Africans. This rock would have built memorials, churches, government buildings but, it would have also built cells that enslaved people were held at Zanzibar before they were sold. One of them might have been one of my relatives”.
Rob likes to tell this story to visitors because it makes it personal, and it is an example of how ‘just a rock’ can have a story and link to colonial Britain.
Statue of Adam Sedgwick who the museum is dedicated to (taken by Amalia Robertson)
Community
“I have cleared some cases to make a Community Cabinet, where people bring in their own fossils and write their own labels and put them on display. It’s gone really well”.
Check more on this project by clicking on the link below.
https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2019/05/29/community-curating-at-the-sedgwick-museum/
Latest project
Rob’s latest project is a display on women and girls in geology.
The project starts with 5- to 6-year-olds and goes all the way up to 80-year-olds.
“Had to think differently about how to share with community members over staff and academics and learning the right way to guide and facilitate communications and conservations and developing displays in a non-hierarchy/traditional way”.
Questions
What’s your favourite fossil?
“It’s changed because I’ve learned more about the collections, but my favourite dinosaur growing up was Stegosaurus and I grow up in a town not far from Peterborough and we had a stegosaur tail spike from that town in the collection”.
What did you do today?
“I had my Christmas hat on today, so I was making some Christmas themed dinosaurs to put in the cases for a trail. I edited a logo to have a Christmas hat on it, but I also had some kind of climate change, sustainability thoughts and work going on. We are redoing our community display cases and I don’t have very much money despite being a university museum, but we have lots of old displays. So, I’m hoping to recycle some of those as I’ve been doing some designs to reuse these materials. We are a small team, so I also did a bit of front of house, welcoming visitors in”.
Advice for breaking into palaeontological collections
Look at palaeontology as a subject that is tackling ethics, decolonization, conservation, and climate change, as well as a science.
Collections have lots of different stories to tell.
Learn about the history of palaeontology, if you can bring that into the museum with you with your job interviews and show your worth.
Talk about what museums are doing today.
Public engagement is key, some academics in palaeontology don’t have these skills, along with talking about ethics.
A lot of the current jobs are short term and collections based.
If you can move rocks and fossils and ID them, that’s good, but if you can look at a draw of rocks and fossils and whilst cataloguing can see they are from a certain country that you know might have some information on colonial history that something you can bring.
Do you think it helped doing a museum masters over a paleo masters?
“I decided in my last year at Portsmouth that I didn’t want to go into academia. I think If I had done that, I would have been more focused on a Palaeontology PhD. If I had gone down that route I’m not sure how much I would have been involved in museums and I would have had a different perspective. But I wanted to do something a bit more practical in the way of hands-on stuff. I chose museums because I get to see a load of fossils and rocks and to talk about them all the time. And the way to do that without being in academia, for me, was museums”.