Accessible Museum Research Articles

The role of museums in geoscience education: A perspective

Publicly accessible museums are cultural centers that enrich the life of a community. From an educational viewpoint, they provide informal, lifelong learning experiences. In Lee and Fortner's 2005 survey of geoscience educators, informal science education ranked as an important instructional approach for the future of earth science education.

Carbon Isotopic Signatures of Elytra Reflect Larval Diet in Luperine Rootworms (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae)

Larval host associations in luperine rootworm beetles (Chrysomelidae), including the many pest species in the subtribes Diabroticina and Aulacophorina, remain largely unknown because adults often feed on plant species and families other than those favored for larval development. Because important questions concerning the evolutionary origins, systematic relationships, and pest management of luperine rootworms require knowledge of their larval host associations, techniques that enable inference of larval host use from adult structures are needed. Using spotted cucumber beetle, Diabrotica undecimpunctata howardi Barber, and striped cucumber beetle, Acalymma vittatum (F.), as model species, this study confirms that the stable carbon isotopic signature of adult e1ytra(the ratio between 13Cand 12C isotopes, expressed as δ13C)accurately reflects whether an individual consumed C3 plants throughout its life, C3 plants as a larva and C4 plants as an adult, or C4 plants exclusively. The study also demonstrates that, because the δ13C of elytra is unaffected by time, easily accessible museum specimens can be used for δ13C assays.

The Accessible museum: model programs of accessibility for disabled and older people

The Accessible museum: model programs of accessibility for disabled and older people

The Education of a Plains Archeologist

By personal inclination, in my remarks here tonight, I should be offering you selected data and matured conclusions based on aspects of my own work of nearly a half century in the archeology and prehistory of the Great Plains. At a joint gathering such as this, a topic on Plains-Woodland relationships was one of those suggested to me as particularly appro priate. Nevertheless, on continued reflection and having in mind the fact that my formal education and training long antedated the new archeology and were nourished, indeed, on such simpler intellectual fare as tribal identifications through archeology, the reconstruction of cultural history and of extinct lifeways, and above all, the long-time relationships between man and nature in the region in which I was born and reared, I have decided to use this opportunity to set forth what might be termed a confession ? perhaps over-personalized ? of the faith that stands behind my work. In the mid-1920s, as was the case with countless schoolboys elsewhere, the col lecting of Indian pottery fragments and arrowheads on the streamside prairies and fields of central Kansas was already taking up a disproportionate share of my waking hours, as also of the leisure time of some of my associates and fishing companions. At that time, the accessible museum collections where we could carry our finds in hopes of identification and comparison were most charitably characterized as cabinets of curios ities; and their caretakers were natural history teachers who knew even less about local antiquities than we did. The local college library shelves held an incomplete set of the annual reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology and some of the Smithsonian annual reports, both series then still distrib uted when available to anyone who wrote for them. There was little in these that related directly to central Kansas; and I suspect we were more deeply stirred by the writings of such newspapermen as Paul Wellman of the Wichita Beacon. It was through such local writers on local history that we first learned the names of some of the Indian tribes of our area, and later, that they were probably among the native people encountered by Coronado in 1541. To Coronado's visit must be attributed my first remembered spadework