College of the Atlantic’s natural history museum is set for $119K upgrade
Courtesy / College of the Atlantic
College of the Atlantic’s Dorr Museum conservator Ron Harvey, right, instructs a COA student on collections care.
State-of-the-art storage improvements and better preservation of more than 3,000 animal specimens are on tap for the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History at College of the Atlantic.
The Bar Harbor museum recently received grants of $96,000 from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and $23,000 from the Dorr Foundation for the upgrade, the college said.
The grants will allow the museum to outfit two new collection storage spaces in COA’s Center for Human Ecology. The spaces will be equipped with a movable high-density storage system, including museum-grade cabinets and shelves, archival supplies and a walk-in freezer, said Carrie Graham, the Dorr Museum's director.
“It’s also going to allow us to have our collections much more organized and accessible, which will allow us to increase our use of them,” Graham said in a news release.
The museum is integrated into COA’s academic program. Students receive hands-on training in museum education, exhibition preparation, and collections care and management. Over the years, COA students have gone on to postgraduate positions at institutions including the Smithsonian, Field Museum, Boston Museum of Science, Portland Children’s Museum, Abbe Museum and Peabody Essex Museum.
“To our knowledge, COA is the only institution in the U.S. that offers coursework and related experiential collections care training at the undergraduate level,” Graham said.
For now, collections are housed in four different spaces across two buildings, none of which were designed for such purposes.
Students will play a key role in carrying out the relocation project, and have already begun that work as part of coursework with conservator Ron Harvey and Steve Ressel, the Kim M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies. The students learned best practices in collections handling, conducted background research related to the installation of the storage system, evaluated the types of cabinets needed, and calculated the total volume of the existing collections.
The 400-student private college established the Dorr Museum in 1982 to deepen public understanding of Maine’s natural history through student work. With 13,000 visitors per year, it is one of only a few museums in Maine devoted entirely to natural history, with mammal, bird, herpetology, entomology, zoology, geology and skeletal collections, all of which have been prepared by COA students as part of their academic experience.
The collections offer hands-on experiences to learners of all ages through natural history and art courses at the college, public outreach activities, school group programs, and loans to other institutions throughout the state.
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