Every object in a museum collection begins as an answer to a question someone needed to ask.
What did Minnesota look like 100 million years ago? We collect fossils to help answer that. Who lived here 10,000 years ago? We examine what they left behind. What plants, animals, and people share this landscape now? We gather contemporary material culture, building a record of the present even as it unfolds.
Our collections aren’t just objects on shelves. They’re data points. When we keep items together with their stories and context, we create something more powerful than a simple archive: We build tools for understanding change over time, for planning resilience, for explaining how our world works.
The Science Museum of Minnesota’s regional focus makes our collection uniquely valuable. As the repository for Minnesota-specific information, we hold materials that help explain global change through an intensely local lens. The particular reveals the universal. A Minnesota fossil bed tells us about ancient seas. A single preserved garment carries techniques passed down through generations.
This specificity allows us to help make connections that would be impossible without it. When researchers studying flying squirrel fluorescence under UV light needed to test their theories, they turned to our specimens. When scientists coring lake sediment found pine needles dating to the post-glacial era, our collection helped them reconstruct what these landscapes looked like centuries ago. The questions keep coming, and the collection keeps answering — often in ways we never anticipated.
For too long, collections lived behind closed doors. You had to know which museum to call, which journal to read, which conference to attend. The general public, especially, was shut out. Makers, artists, descendant communities — people with the deepest connections to these materials — often had no idea what existed or where.
But we’re changing that. Through digitization and online access, we’re reconnecting people with their past – and continuing to preserve items for the future. High-resolution images reveal details that even holding an object might not show: the precise pattern of embroidery stitches on a historical textile, the tool marks on a piece of pottery, the structure of a pressed plant specimen.
During our Chiapas digitization project, we photographed a complete traditional outfit and shared the images with the source community. A local ceramic artist saw the shirt’s intricate stitching and was moved by it. She and her cousin sought out family members who remembered the technique. Together, they learned it and created a new shirt, reviving a craft that might otherwise have faded from living memory. One archival image became a bridge between generations, inspiring new creation.
That’s the power of collections: They show us where we’ve been, help us understand where we are, and give us the tools to imagine where we’re going.
