Curating museum exhibit dioramas: Considerations and guidelines
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For decades, museums have been using dioramas as an exhibition and educational tool to convey information about natural history and anthropology to the public. Recently, a debate over the educational and exhibit value of dioramas has prompted some museums to remove dioramas from exhibit. Even those remaining may eventually need to be removed from exhibit and curated. Composed of multiple components that may have been individually catalogued, dioramas cannot necessarily be curated the same way that most collections objects can be. No literature currently exists that discusses the curation of dioramas. Using dioramas in the ornithology collection of the Natural Science Research Laboratory at the Museum of Texas Tech University, the aim of this research is to identify and discuss the topics that must be considered when curating dioramas and compile guidelines to assist other institutions in this process.