paralytically modest museums department

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It's Museum Week on Twitter this week, which prompted me to sift through my "Future Story Ideas" and "Misc" folders to see if anything relevant lurked about, waiting for its moment in the sun.

I found this: an article published in the Globe in 1932 declaring that, based on a report conducted for the Carnegie Corporation, Canadian museums were boring. Read deeper and you'll find greater complexities. Some institutions were getting off the ground; others suffered from a lack of endowments. Old models such as rooms tucked away in the middle of a university, lingered on. Only a few museums were "well worthy of the towns in which they are situated," such as the Royal Ontario Museum, which was undergoing an expansion along Queen's Park when this article was published.

Read the full article below to discover the extent of "paralytic modesty" in Canada's museums of the early 1930s.


The Globe, November 24, 1932


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