TY - JOUR
T1 - Otis T. Mason's Tour of Europe
T2 - Observation, Exchange, and Standardization in Public Museums, 1889
AU - Kohlstedt, Sally
PY - 2008/7/1
Y1 - 2008/7/1
N2 - When the Smithsonian's curator of anthropology, Otis T. Mason, took a two-month tour of European museums, he participated in a tradition of learning from museum peers even as he demonstrated one way that international standards for museum practice were shared and extended in the late nineteenth century. In this era of major museum building, an emerging group of professional administrators were increasingly self-conscious about the status of their own institutions and eager to adopt state-of-the-art practices. Mason's tour was timed to enable him to attend the specialized society meetings held in conjunction with the Jubilee International Exposition in Paris in 1889. The rest of his tour was spent visiting museums in Britain and northern Europe where he met leading museum administrators including William Flower, Adolph B. Meyer, and Adolph Bastian. Mason's letters to the National Museum's director, George Brown Goode, and to his wife, Sallie Mason, and daughters, Sallie and Emilie, offer a valuable window on European museums in the late nineteenth century and reveal the networks that facilitated an exchange of materials and ideas among a museum specialists and administrators as they established increasingly similar standards of museum practice.
AB - When the Smithsonian's curator of anthropology, Otis T. Mason, took a two-month tour of European museums, he participated in a tradition of learning from museum peers even as he demonstrated one way that international standards for museum practice were shared and extended in the late nineteenth century. In this era of major museum building, an emerging group of professional administrators were increasingly self-conscious about the status of their own institutions and eager to adopt state-of-the-art practices. Mason's tour was timed to enable him to attend the specialized society meetings held in conjunction with the Jubilee International Exposition in Paris in 1889. The rest of his tour was spent visiting museums in Britain and northern Europe where he met leading museum administrators including William Flower, Adolph B. Meyer, and Adolph Bastian. Mason's letters to the National Museum's director, George Brown Goode, and to his wife, Sallie Mason, and daughters, Sallie and Emilie, offer a valuable window on European museums in the late nineteenth century and reveal the networks that facilitated an exchange of materials and ideas among a museum specialists and administrators as they established increasingly similar standards of museum practice.
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U2 - 10.1179/mhj.2008.1.2.181
DO - 10.1179/mhj.2008.1.2.181
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:80053135501
SN - 1936-9816
VL - 1
SP - 181
EP - 208
JO - Museum History Journal
JF - Museum History Journal
IS - 2
ER -