Issue 24 Editorial

As much as they are defined by their collections of objects, museums are also collections of stories. To my mind, the best museum research surfaces those stories not only with imagination and scholarly rigour, but also with consideration of the identities of those whose stories we are engaging with. 

One of my favourite writers, Ursula Le Guin, said that ‘The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story’ (Le Guin, 1990). Objects in a museum store are much the same. They are things on shelves, a repository of potential, but it is from viewing and engaging with them that their stories emerge. Exhibitions and galleries are a vital part of that process, and so is store-based research. This is not a themed journal issue, but if it were, then research in stores is a central motif. 

Le Guin grew up in California, the daughter of the famous anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. Apart from their writer daughter, the Kroebers are best remembered for their work with Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, an Indigenous people from what is now California. The Yahi’s numbers were diminished by the novel diseases, for which they had no immunity, brought to the Americas by European settlers; but they were also victims of the Californian genocide. Not all stories have happy endings. 

However, through careful research and hard work, we can bring some of the light of understanding to even the darkest topics. Research by Alexandra Eveleigh, Laura Humphreys, Jenny Shaw, and Anna Wagn into the repatriation of the remains of Preben Holger Larsen, published here, is a remarkable story of the rediscovery of the cremated remains of a member of the Danish resistance in Nazi-occupied Denmark during the Second World War. How those remains came to be found in the Wellcome Collection is a story in itself, but that this discovery led to the repatriation of Larsen’s remains only highlights the power of good research. 

The Larsen paper is ultimately the product of successful collaborations between different museum organisations, experts and nations. Another paper, by Mike Esbester and Karen Baker, also reflects on research collaborations, particularly in addressing challenging histories. It demonstrates the benefits of meaningful, long-term collaboration between academic and gallery, library, archive and museum partners, as well as with stakeholder communities. Such relationships can allow for a coming to terms with difficult pasts in a respectful and mediated way: in this case the Railway Work, Life & Death project which explores the tens of thousands of deaths and injuries sustained in constructing, maintaining and operating the British railway network. 

Difficult stories of war and injury often require careful mediation to be taken from museum store to a position where they can be placed in front of a member of the public. This is as much out of respect for the public as from a duty of care towards those represented by those objects and stories. However, there are other instances in which stepping back from interpretation and simply allowing the visitor to experience the material culture of a large open store can have different effects. The paper by Yuen Ting Yiu examines the potential of open storage, such as that found at the National Railway Museum (or indeed in the Hawking Building at the Science and Innovation Park in Wroughton), positing that it can imbue visitors with a sense of contemplative wonder rather than always being impenetrable and overwhelming, as has been the received wisdom for some time. 

Returning to the theme of collaboration, and to the indigenous peoples of North America (albeit to the opposite side of the continent to the Yahi), Hartman Deetz and Milly Mulcahey-Knight’s paper addresses untold stories in the collection by giving voice where there had previously been silence. Hartman Deetz, a Wampanoag arts and education consultant and tribal citizen, and Milly Mulcahey-Knight, a white, non-Indigenous anthropologist, collaborate to reinterpret objects in the Science Museum Group collection made from birchbark. In doing so they offer us a window into the stories the objects represent which speak back to the indigenous nations of the Atlantic North-East in what is now the United States and Canada, but they also tell us more about the culture in which those objects were collected and originally catalogued. 

In May 2025 I became the Science Museum’s latest Head of Collections. It is a role I take great honour in holding. I follow many great curators in this position, and have the privilege of working alongside many more. There is much debate about what it means to be a curator in the twenty-first century, and I don’t think that I fully know the answer, but I do know that it means to be a creative researcher, to be a fluent communicator, and above all to be a storyteller. I am sure there will be much great research and many more wonderful stories to come. In the meantime, enjoy Issue 24 of the Science Museum Group Journal.