Engaging Archives: Reports from the Field I

The Penn Museum is located on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The address is 3260 South St, Philadelphia, PA 19104. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10am to 5pm and first Wednesdays until 8pm. It is closed on mondays and all major holidays. The cost to attend the museum is 18 dollars for adults, 16 dollars for seniors (65 and over), and 13 dollars for youth (6-17) and college students (with student ID’s), and free for children (5 and under), University of Pennsylvania students, and members of the Penn Museum. To contact the museum email info@pennmuseum.org or call at (215)-898-4000. 

For research purposes at the Penn Museum, researchers have to submit a Photography/Illustration Permission Form to photograph or illustrate objects. For commercial use, film and photography companies have to contact the Public Relations Department and for personal use, small recording devices for non-commercial purposes are allowed like phones and small cameras. To get publication-quality photographs and illustrations of Museum objects and permission to publish them, the company or person(s) must contact the Museum Archives. Publishing or sharing Penn Museum images and media for non-profit educational use does not require permission. 

The Penn Museum has an extensive online Online Collections Database that contains over 400,000 artifacts. The museum has finding aids for its online collections that can be found by searching for “Finding Aid” in the Digital Collections search. Collections are cataloged in WorldCat and ArchivesSpace and there is a Collection Study Room for scholars to examine artifacts up close. All special collection visit requests must be submitted at least four weeks in advance, and only individuals listed on the Collections Access Request Form will be permitted in study areas. Photography and scientific testing require prior approval, and researchers must document examined objects and submit copies of resulting publications. 

I selected the Native American section of the Penn Museum’s archives due to its diverse collection that includes contemporary Native voices, as well as its connection to the issue of repatriation. What first drew my interest was the museum's connection to the NAGPRA and its parallels to issues at Dartmouth, where there have been controversies over the wrongful keeping of Native human remains. The Penn Museum has acknowledged its part prior to NAGPRA enactment in this issue and has since enacted its Penn Human Remains Policy and began extensive repatriation protocols.