What goes on behind the scenes at a natural history museum? What do you do with all the specimens that don’t quite fit in the museum’s building? This entertaining short video from KPCC takes a look at “The Whale Warehouse”, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles’ overflow storage facility.

There are some interesting parallels between museums and libraries, although your storage problems differ a bit when you’re dealing with shelving an oversized book versus shelving a whale skull that has continued to leak oil for over 25 years.

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

Discussion

4 Thoughts on "The Whale Warehouse"

For fans of whale skeletons, ‘Sightlines’, a book of essays by the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, contains a great piece on her visit to the Whale Hall of the Bergen Natural History Museum during its renovation.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum solved this problem by opening an annex (The Udvar-Hazy Center) at Dulles Airport. If you have not been there, it is worth the trip. The highlights are a blackbird, the Enola Gay, a Concorde and of course the Discovery space shuttle.

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