Challenges in wonderland

To the families, tourists and school parties that flock there each year – now numbering more than half a million visitors – the purpose of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History must seem obvious. It is a ‘wonderland of natural history’ where examples of the rich diversity of the living Earth inform and delight children, such as those who chose it for the Guardian Family Friendly Award in 2005. In 2009 it shared a Queen’s Anniversary Prize with the other Oxford museums and libraries for their ‘outstanding quality and high public benefit’. The award was a well-deserved curtain-raiser for a year of public events celebrating the century and a half since the museum’s foundation in 1860.

Yet its nineteenth-century purpose was very different. Championed by a few influential voices within Oxford, led by the anatomist Henry Acland, the museum embodied a revival of science teaching and research in Oxford, largely moribund since the late seventeenth century. The ‘cathedral of science’, designed by Benjamin Woodward in the Italian Gothic style, opened its doors in time to welcome delegates to the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in June 1860 (see right). It included offices, lecture rooms and laboratories for the professors of medicine, comparative anatomy, zoology, geology, mineralogy, natural philosophy (physics) and chemistry. But science expanded so rapidly that the professors soon outgrew the museum. One by one they migrated to purpose-built laboratories in neighbouring Parks Road and South Parks Road.

If it is no longer the centre of science teaching and research in Oxford, what is the purpose of the museum today? As Lady Heseltine, Chair of the Museum’s Advisory Board, said at the anniversary dinner in May: ‘The most important work of the museum is invisible to the casual visitor. The research that goes on behind closed doors, the incredible collections – these are the inner heartbeat of the museum.’ Six million specimens, most of them secreted in storerooms far from the public gaze, hold the answers to questions about the history of the Earth and its living things, a fantastic resource at a time of biodiversity loss and environmental change.

Curatorial staff spend much of their time answering requests from scholars all over the world for loans of specimens, and the task of preparing, identifying, classifying and cataloguing both the existing holdings and new acquisitions is never-ending. When they can, they go off into the field themselves, diving for shrimps, collecting beetles or digging for fossils. In 2010 the public had the privilege of seeing some of the most remarkable recent discoveries for themselves in the exhibition ‘Exceptional fossils from Chengjiang, China: Early animal life’. These fossils of soft-bodied creatures representing more than 100 species are from the early Cambrian period, around 525 million years old: the exhibition was the first to show them outside China.

In addition to its academic work, the museum’s public role has been transformed in the past two decades. Under its first Director, Keith Thomson, and his successor Jim Kennedy, an enthusiastic team of education and outreach staff has guided thousands of schoolchildren and families to discover the museum for themselves. They have gone out into the local community, taking exhibits to audiences who have limited opportunities to come to the museum. Almost all this activity was made possible by funding from the Renaissance in the Regions programme of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). Meanwhile, generous donors have helped to transform the overstuffed cases that once filled the court into attractive exhibits that draw the visitor in to learn more about the dodo or the Megalosaurus.

When Jim Kennedy retired as Director this year, he was able to say that he had achieved his aim of making the museum ‘the public focus for science in Oxford and the friendliest place for the public in the University’. His successor, Susan Iversen, recognises that there will be challenging times ahead, with projected cuts to University funding including earmarked support for museums and libraries. ‘We have a responsibility to maintain curation of these internationally significant collections, to protect biological specimens vulnerable to decay, and to exploit them for research’, she says. ‘And just as important are the activities for the wider community that are now such an integral part of the museum’s daily life.’