Ovamatched: Some background

Today's topic of enquiry is: why are these eggs being curated now?

After all, collecting eggs was outlawed in the UK in 1954 and possessing any eggs collected after that date has been illegal since 1981, so you'd think that the collections would have had plenty of time to shuffle into a comfortable niche by now. My theory is that it is the very illegality of the eggs which saw them slip down the pecking order.

If you know what I mean

There are a number of reasons that a museum would choose not to display eggs today. They are physically and chemically fragile, vulnerable to mechanical and light damage. They remain objects of desire for illegal collectors, not only increasing the risk of crime directed at the museum but also potentially serving as inspiration to potential nest-robbers in the wild. Finally, to many people, eggs are just not that interesting. They might carry interesting stories (and to many collectors they certainly did), or serve as objects to illustrate a particular species of bird, but in my limited observation they do not appear to excite interest in themselves.

Which is why we do things like this

I speculate that a large part of this disinterest is simply because most people do not have regular contact with eggs outside the context of sausages, bacon and toast. Whereas at least one of the collectors I researched started out with eggs given to him by his mother, these days nests are a hazard to be avoided. How many of us have heard “don't touch it, because if you do then the mother won't take it back” from a well-intentioned yet factually misinformed authority figure? The illegality of collecting, or even temporarily possessing, wild eggs has likely furthered this thematic isolation, and actual isolation seems to have been the consequence of disappearing hedgerows and wooded areas. In short, how are people supposed to be interested in items that they are largely unfamiliar with?

Arcane talismans from the netherworld

Public interest in eggs is a subject I hope to return to later, but others have argued that this disconnect is not so much due to eggs being uninteresting as people lacking the opportunity to discover an interest in them.

But I disgress. I should be clear that the eggs I am working with haven't languished, completely forgotten. Some effort was made in the 1970's to put them in a semblance of order (more on that later), several have been reboxed at least once. But given that they were always extremely unlikely to make it into the public eye, save the occasional item in the bird displays, there was no convincing reason to prioritise time and resources for them when there were always more immediate and demanding projects at hand.

Alright, so now I've covered why the egg collections haven't been worked on until now, so what changed? The answer is three words: Kelvin Hall Project.

Kelvin Hall has been a constant refrain throughout the last year of my classes. It's BIG NEWS for the Glasgow museum/culture scene. The current building was built in 1927 almost opposite the Kelvingrove Museum, a red stone twin. It's quite fetching on the outside, and huge on the inside. It's been host to concerts, circuses, sporting events and for 23 years, Glasgow's Museum of Transport. It's now become the focus of a joint effort between The Hunterian, Glasgow Museums, and the National Library of Scotland. Since the Transport Museum upped sticks to reimagine itself as the Riverside Museum in 2011, Kelvin Hall has been largely empty. In (I think) 2014 funding was secured to begin work to turn it into a facility for all of the above organisations. According to the plan, it's going to be a workspace with offices, a leisure centre, a state-of-the-art storage facility for the museums, and shelter for baby unicorns.

And to think you bought the narwhal story

Ok, I might be overstating it a tad, but the way people talk about it, Kelvin Hall will solve problems that we've not even thought of yet. And who's to say they're wrong? Both The Hunterian and Glasgow Museums have serious storage issues at the moment, they are bursting at the seams. I was going to put a picture of the more dire examples here, but they're so ramshackle that it would probably be a security risk.

All that storage (and it is a LOT) is only part of the story. There's going to be research and teaching labs, talks and tours around the stores (in much the same way as the GMRC), meeting/conference spaces and what I think will be the largest gym in the city.

Sounds great, doesn't it? All of this embedded right in the middle of the west end of Glasgow, within easy walking distance of the university and surrounded by other cultural institutions. It goes without saying that my own course in Museum Studies is going to be massively overhauled to take advantage of all this. If only I'd waited a few years, right?

Doesn't it look clean? Industrial Glasgow was, of course, spotless

The project was in planning for a very long time, but work started as soon as money became available. This very sudden onset has had two effects pertinent to my own work: it has made unpacking attic collections necessary as part of a larger decant project, and it has thus provided an opportunity to do some work on them while we're at it. Curating the Zoology Museum's eggs was a long-held wish of curator Maggie Reilly, but for reasons already outlined, scrabbling through the attic for eggs was never going to be top priority. Kelvin Hall is uprooting all that anyway, it's the perfect opportunity to perform some long-delayed research.

It also has one other major advantage. Having the eggs properly curated and organised not only brings them an atom's-width closer to becoming a display collection, but it makes them far more accessible for their primary purpose as a research collection. Despite their unfashionable status in the public eye, the scientific community remains very interested in eggs. Everyone knows about the Ratcliffe paper of 1970, in which historical egg shells were used to implicate DDT in the degradation of shell thickness, but this kind of research isn't a closed book. As a resource to study the effects of climate change, pollution and other environmental concerns, they're actually very valuable.

No reason for this picture, I just think it's pretty

So, given how long they've been sitting around, why is it only now that the eggs are seeing curatorial efforts again? Because they're in the middle of a decant into a shiny new storage facility, and we carpe'd that diem.

...Update on business!