Collections

Summary: Field pea attained greater importance as a cultivated plant in Bulgaria at the beginning of the 20th century. Until 1964, only breeding for forage was in use, with developed winter varieties №5 and Pleven 2. Recently, fi eld pea achieved the greatest increase (283.3%) in the sown areas, since the variety structure was updated annually. There are 10 registered varieties in total, with 7 spring and 3 winter ones. The composition of the Bulgarian Pisum collections is highly variable, with accessions of diverse status. The greatest effi ciency is obtained in a combination of bulk method in the early generations and certain features of pedigree, single seed method, with possible modifi cations and inclusion of the mutational variability.

This paper is a review of the history of museums in the Republic of Benin which sheds light mainly on the specific history from 1920 to 1947. Museums in the country remain static in regards to their collections management and exhibitions though the government has been developing new projects. Privately-owned museums appearing since the 1990s reflect the need for a paradigm shift, from the ethnographic museum to the cultural museum. This development requires the attention of policy-makers in order to address both social development and contemporary artistic creation.

This article reflects on the process of digitising a collection of almost 1800 Victorian Valentines cards. The Museum of London’s card collection is only a fraction of an individual’s extensive collection of greetings cards. This article argues that the work of documenting and photographing the cards revealed information about the nature of collecting. There have always been inconsistencies between professional and personal collecting activities: the museum acquired just part of the collection because the entire collection was so vast it was considered unmanageable. Collections online and digitisation work has suggested several points about the nature of the collection as context and this short article discusses some of these ideas.

Potentials of scientific research in general are obviously subject to changes in accordance with current digital information and communication environment, which is capable to give new, advanced performances, or those essentially different from the traditional ones, even in the domain of humanities, including literary studies as well. In this connection, developing a digital heritage repository, as a way of organizing and composing objects of heritage in selected thematic entities, is demanding, but also inspiring possibility in the case of literary heritage as well. The aim of the proposed paper is to examine potentials and advantages of developing a digital repository of Meša Selimović’s literary work. The focused problem is going to be approached in a holistic manner, which means in terms of its practical and cultural values, but also in terms of its feasibility. The authors of the proposed paper are taking interdisciplinary methodological sides, which is caused by the authors’ d...

The von Hauenschild collection was one of the founding collections of the Museo de Antropología, a university museum at the Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, located in Cordoba Capital, central Argentina. The collection is one of the largest at the museum with over 4000 objects from the nearby province of Santiago del Estero, a place almost unexamined by Argentinean archaeologists since the early works initiated by the Wagner brothers in the 1920s. Santiago has been seen as a marginal place in the national Argentinean history and perceived as an impoverished and remote place, but during part of the early 20th century, Santiago was thriving, especially at the time of the large railroad constructions in the country Santiago was also the home of the German-born engineer, Jorge von Hauenschild for 30 years. He formed the “von Hauenschild Collection” by excavating pre-historical tombs in the province in his quest for archaeological treasures. The colle...

Nonparametric estimators of the mean total cost have been proposed in a variety of settings. In clinical trials it is generally impractical to follow up patients until all have responded, and therefore censoring of patient outcomes and total cost will occur in practice. We describe a general longitudinal framework in which costs emanate from two streams, during sojourn in health states and in transition from one health state to another. We consider estimation of net present value for expenditures incurred over a finite time horizon from medical cost data that might be incompletely ascertained in some patients. Because patient specific demographic and clinical characteristics would influence total cost, we use a regression model to incorporate covariates. We discuss similarities and differences between our net present value estimator and other widely used estimators of total medical costs. Our model can accommodate heteroscedasticity, skewness and censoring in cost data and provides ...

The birds of paradise are a classic example of the way in which early modern European naturalists encountered New World exotics and struggled to incorporate them into existing knowledge. Images of perpetually floating, dew-drinking birds from a ‘spice island’ paradise were the imagined animate counterparts to the legless skins that were brought from the Indies. These rare skins were bought at great expense to become highly prized items in curiosity collections. Yet, bird of paradise skins had been traded for many thousands of years before Europeans reached the Indies. Skins prepared by hunters were exchanged as part of relations between New Guinean tribes, transported in kora kora craft around local trade networks in South East Asia, and passed into mainland Asia from key entrepôts such as the port of Malacca.

These trade networks led to interactions between diverse groups of people, from tribal hunters to Moluccan sultans, Asian traders to European nobles, each of whom attributed different meanings and values to the birds. The skins oscillated between being high-value commercial ‘things’ and prized symbolic ‘objects’.  Along the path of transit some of the meanings with which the birds were imbued followed the skins, and others did not, depending on the interests of people handling them.  This paper will give an overview of the formation of the different cultural constructions of the birds of paradise, that were the result of not only the bird skins themselves, but of the knowledge and symbolic meanings that were transported along with them and how this interacted with the different cultural contexts into which they were introduced. This will show how the plume preparation practices of New Guinean hunters, allowing them to literally and metaphorically inhabit the ‘skins’ of the birds, led to the distant and angelic Manucodiata of early modern Europe; and how fragments of information carried by Asian traders reached and rebounded from mainland Asia to create the Mamuco Diuata (birds of God) in South East Asian cultures that had newly converted to Islam.

We describe how we went about designing visualization tools for exploratory access to collections of multiple translations of a literary work. Collections of this kind are relatively small. But big collections are collections of small collections. Visualizations should help us to explore on multiple scales, shifting smoothly between (say) metadata on millions of items to (say) investigating how ten or a few hundred closely similar items differ in detail. For example: a small set of differing translations and adaptations of a work in one language, from different times and places; or a set of these sets in different languages. Collections of translations and adaptations have great potential value in education, research, and creative practices. We are creating ways to explore such collections, prompting various kinds of “noticing ” both in them, and in the translated work. Playful and exploratory approaches need to be combined with linguistics analyses and expert understandings of the ...

Abstract: We propose new tests to detect a change in the mean of a time series. Like many existing tests, the new ones are based on the CUSUM process. Existing CUSUM tests require an estimator of a scale parameter to make them asymptotically distribution free under the no change ...

In this review I 'pitch in' to a debate about the 'value' of European collections in South African museums; in relation to the the 'French Connections' exhibition (2012-2013), at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. This exhibition utilised the JAG's collection of French and African/French art, and was staged in association with the France-South Africa Season. The review also notes the earlier Standard Bank collaboration with the France-South Africa Season, entitled, '20th Century Masters: The Human Figure'(2012).

While affirming the need to critically engage with [South] African epistemologies, I also question the notion of what constitutes an 'authentic [South] African identity'  (and by extension notions of cultural authenticity in the museum context) in the global/local present.

An important parameter in the study of population evolution is θ=4Nν, where N is the effective population size and ν is the rate of mutation per locus per generation. Therefore, θ represents the mean number of mutations per site per generation. There are many estimators of θ, one of them being the mean number of pairwise nucleotide differences, which we call T_2. Other estimators are T_1, based on the number of segregating sites and T_3, based on the number of singletons. The concept of selective neutrality can be interpreted as a differentiated nucleotide distribution for mutant sites when compared to the overall nucleotide distribution. Tajima (1989) has proposed the so-called Tajima's test of selective neutrality based on T_2-T_1. Its complex empirical behavior (Kiihl, 2005) motivates us to propose a test statistic solely based on T_2. We are thus able to prove asymptotic normality under different assumptions on the number of sequences and number of sites via U-statistics the...

The Cambridge Inventory Project, sponsored by the Friedberg Genizah Project and carried out by a number of researchers at the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, was the first attempt to provide accurate information regarding the size and classification of the more than 193,000 Genizah manuscript fragments held at Cambridge University Library. Prior to this project, no authoritative list of valid shelf marks was available, nor was it known how many fragments were classified under any one shelf mark. The provision of such data and the creation of a searchable database were essential for the planning and implementation of a future digitization project. This article not only describes the ensuing Inventory Project, it also uses the project’s findings, together with additional information in previously unseen archives, to provide a new history of how these collections were formed over time.

The thesis examines the activities of Štefan Butkovič and the activities related to the establishment and operation of the Technical Museum in Košice in the context of the Czechoslovak socio-political conditions after World War II. It outlines the develop-ment of Slovak museums and the key phenomena relevant to each period in history since its creation in our territory. The aim of the thesis is to present the contribution and importance of the founder and first director of the Technical Museum, Štefan Butkovič, to the cultural life of the country and its twenty-year-long activity in this institute.
The work is divided into four chapters. The first part of the thesis characterizes histo-riography and sources for the history of museology, the Technical Museum and the personality of Štefan Butkovič. The second chapter provides a picture of the theoretical issues, focuses on the process of the emergence of museums in Slovakia until 1948, while providing information on the establishment of the first technical museum in Slo-vakia and its founder. The second chapter presents the core of the work and contains the most fertile period of Štefan Butkovič at the time of the Institute's leadership until his departure in 1973. The last chapter points to the life of Štefan Butkovič after leaving the museum, his research activities and work in the 1980s. At the same time, he de-monstrates in the individual chapters the socio-political, cultural and ideological con-text of the time influencing museology in Slovakia.

In her last will and testament, educator-activist Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) declared, “I LEAVE YOU LOVE. Love builds.” A direct descendant of former chattel slaves, Bethune believed in building from the bottom up: beginning with love, or positive thoughts, and manifesting those thoughts. By accretion of goods and goodwill, she built not only a physical school which fostered the arts as a bridge toward world citizenship for disenfranchised black people but also a school of thought, extending to encompass purposeful government service at local and federal levels, toward achieving a just society. Bethune’s determined example of building by accretion informs and helps us to better understand and articulate a wide variety of African American women’s collecting in, of, and through, the arts. This article explores and defines—according to philosophy, purpose, practice, type, scope, and audience—various examples of collecting and collections among selected African American women in th...

Over the past decade, a multitude of digital platforms engaging with Indigenous collections of ancestral belongings have been developed for the public in an effort to reconsider and reconceptualize notions of access and Indigenous ownership in virtual space. An initiative in partnership with the Onsite Gallery, the Virtual Platform for Indigenous Art (VPIA) is a newly developed resource that originates from Dr. Gerald McMaster’s Entangled Gaze Project at the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge, OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. VPIA is a strategic digital platform that brings together a specific dataset of Indigenous artworks and cultural belongings that portray European and Asian newcomers to Turtle Island, drawn from global museum collections. The platform’s innovative approach to collections is grounded in a dual record format, where visitors are invited to create a Community-Member profile and contribute knowledge and information to artwork pages that consist of a p...

Extensions of credit generally help both the debtor and creditor.  However, a result of our credit-based economy is that individuals are free to make poor economic decisions, and that they should suffer the consequences of these poor decisions.  Although legal rules have had a role in ensuring that debtors are protected from overzealous creditors, commercial transactions can only exist if obligations of debtors are legally enforceable.  The role of government, therefore, is to set parameters for procedures to enforce these obligations, while also setting a floor of protected or exempt assets so that debtors will not become wards of the state.

Following a judgment for $22,761.35 in unpaid attorney’s fees, Burta Rhoads Raborn sought relief under the Texas turnover statute to satisfy the unpaid judgment.  After an evidentiary hearing, the district court ordered the judgment debtor to relinquish to a court-appointed receiver any current or future income he received from his employer.  The receiver was then to distribute a portion of the debtor’s income to the creditor and return enough to the debtor to cover his subsistence, and this turnover was to continue until the judgment was satisfied.

Following appeal, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s judgment, holding that an order directing a judgment debtor to turn over his future paychecks does not violate the Texas constitutional garnishment prohibition.  The court stated that a trial court therefore has the authority to order a judgment debtor to turnover future paychecks upon receipt by the debtor.  However, this cursory opinion of the Texas Supreme Court fails to interpret properly the term “current wages” found in the Texas Constitution’s wage garnishment prohibition.  For this reason, the development of the present interpretation of “current wages” requires critical analysis, following which a meaningful alternative to that interpretation can be suggested.

A storyteller panorama tour, The Story of the Markam Car Collection, was developed as an example for museums and cultural institutions concerning the use of panoramas combined with multimedia to tell stories of specific large objects (antique cars). It was designed for multiple platforms to involve and engage audiences via large curved screens while allowing for access via portable devices. Understanding users’ requirements is essential when designing and developing virtual museum tours. Measuring digital productions’ usability is an ongoing challenge that affects the improvement of user experience and the actual output. A variety of techniques and approaches are available to test digital productions’ usability and the related user experience. It is possible to measure and evaluate the production’s usefulness, including users’ engagement and understanding. However, the best method for assessing museum-related digital productions varies depending on aims, capacity, audience, and loca...

This article introduces the reader to the considerations that had to be taken when cleaning and refreshing two of its large display cases at the Jewish Museum of Greece. Those display cases contain a mixed collection of variable items namely costumes, photographs, prints and wa-tercolours. The staff of the museum planned in advance, ensuring the safety of the objects and staff. Eventually it is natural for unpredicted problems to occur in the real time process. The Museum acknowledged the convenience of the visitor pathway and, moreover, granted visual access to the treatment actions by encouraging communication with the working staff, enriching the visitor experience. Finally the process was beneficial for evaluating the staff's teamwork and the production of a record, and a methodology to be followed for other display cases of the museum and potentially by other institutions.