There is only one place at Yale, and perhaps the entire world, where one can find a taxidermy specimen of a tortoise, an ancient Roman shield, and an 18th-century watercolor from northern India under the same roof.
The Collections Studies Center at Yale's West Campus is a sprawling facility where objects from the university's vast museum collections are housed, preserved, and made available for research.
At a recent open house, Yale students, staff, and faculty were invited to tour the center, which includes the Institution for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, the Yale Peabody Museum's facility for its anthropological and history of science and technology collections, the Yale University Art Gallery's Margaret and Angus Wurtele Study Center, and the Leslie P. and George H. Hume American Furniture Study. The space is also home to the shared conservation lab where objects from the Peabody Museum, the Art Gallery, and Yale Center for British Art are cleaned and conserved.
The open house included tours of the facilities, live demonstrations of conservation work and the science used in preserving cultural heritage, and up-close encounters with the tortoise, the shield, the watercolor, and dozens of other fascinating objects from the collections.
