The natural history centre at the Liverpool Museum

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During the last ten years or so museums world-wide have developed a range of exciting new display techniques. These vary in their objectives from providing entertainment, and thus being firmly rooted in the leisure and tourist industry, to projects concerned more specifically with a scholastic or educational role. The 1987 Museums Association Conference discussed many of the developments taking place in museums. In particular, Martyn Heighton and Robert Lumley reviewed, in separate papers, examples ranging from small local Heritage Centres to the massive developments in Paris. Whilst most have an educational role few are as specifically educational in their objectives as ‘Launchpad’ at the Science Museum and ‘Testbed’ at Liverpool. Often only a few ‘original’ museum specimens are used, and few have as an objective the specific function of making large parts of the stored collections available to the general public. However, some museums have realized the importance of making all their collections available to the public in a direct way. Notable developments were achieved at the University of British Columbia Museum, Vancouver, in 1976, and in a recent article Michael Ames (1985) reviewed three projects in Canada specifically designed to give the public better access to museums and their resources. In Great Britain there have been as yet few developments in this field. Richard Foster, in his paper to the Museums Association Conference in 1981, cited the work at Leeds City Museum, but went on to suggest that too many museums regard their reference collections as of interest only to the specialist. He questioned the validity of this assumption and hoped that within ten years, at least in his own museum, the large numbers of specimens available to the public only by an appointment system would be freely available for public inspection. Since then major developments have taken place at Liverpool. The Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, who assumed responsibility for the Liverpool Museum and six other institutions in 1986, quickly adopted a policy of improving public access to collections. The large objects in the Museum’s collection, together with an adjacent Testbed project, were opened to the public to form a popular new museum, whilst at the Liverpool Museum the first steps have been taken to display the entire ceramic collection with an adjacent study centre, a major part of which was opened to the public in April 1988. Both projects will be the subject of further papers, but perhaps the biggest problem concerns natural history. The vast majority of natural history collections were acquired solely for and as a consequence of research. They were never intended for display or, indeed, for being made available to a wide section of the public. In this country much material was