Throughout human history, the spread of disease has closed borders, restricted civic movement, and fueled fear of the unknown; yet at the same time, it has helped build cultural resilience. On 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) classified COVID-19 as a pandemic. The novel zoonotic disease, first reported to the WHO in December 2019, was no longer restricted to Wuhan or to China, as the highly contagious coronavirus had spread to more than 60 countries. The public health message to citizens everywhere was to save lives by staying home; the economic fallout stemming from this sudden rupture of services and the impact on people’s well-being was mindboggling. Around the globe museums, galleries, and popular world heritage sites closed (Associated Press 2020). The Smithsonian Magazine reported that all 19 institutes, including the National Zoo and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), would be closed to the public on 14 March (Daher 2020). On the same day, New Zealand’s borders closed, and the tourism industry, so reliant on international visitors, choked. Museums previously deemed safe havens of society and culture became petri dishes to avoid; local museums first removed toys from their cafés and children’s spaces, then the museum doors closed and staff worked from home. In some cases, front-of-the-house staff were redeployed to support back-of-the-house staff with cataloguing and digitization projects. You could smell fear everywhere.

What relationship has the university subject of museum studies had with the museum sector? It is often claimed that there is an oversupply of graduates in museum studies ill‐equipped to work in museums, an issue that reveals tensions between understandings of academic study and practical experience. This article addresses these tensions between museums and museum studies through a survey of the historical development of museums and the closely related development of training, professional development and university degrees. The generalist role of the museum worker in the embryonic museums of colonial New Zealand did not require formal academic training. The 1930s witnessed a turning point with grants for professional development from the Carnegie Corporation. The Second World War disrupted the museum sector but from the 1950s museums experienced rapid growth in type and number, developments requiring larger numbers of specialised staff. At the same time the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the museum branch of UNESCO were formed, along with a national professional body The Art gallery and Museums Association of New Zealand (AGMANZ), which provided an international and local voice and focus for the museum sector. Finally, in the 1960s, only 100 years after the first museum was opened, we see the birth of museum‐centred training programmes first administered by the museum sector and in the late 1980s by the university. The article concludes that the increasingly complex and specialised museum profession and the increasingly sophisticated academic analysis of museums emerged at the same time and are inevitably and necessarily intertwined.

Integrating artifacts into the curriculum can increase students' confidence when working with historical fragments. This article provides insight into what happened when students engaged with authentic historical artifacts for the purposes of learning for the first time. It draws from a range of qualitative data collected during a twoyear period while teaching an undergraduate New Zealand history course. Students described learning how to read such objects and gaining skills in how to synthesize information highlighting both the short-and long-term pedagogical benefits stemming from object-based learning (OBL). While OBL needs specialist collections staff to work alongside the teacher, the article closes with encouraging comments about how OBL caters for different age groups, interests, and learning contexts.

This article synthesizes an intern's experience assessing the University of Canterbury's (UC) theatre and concert music program ephemera collection for its teaching and research potential, and evaluating its storage and preservation needs. Held at the Macmillan Brown Library and Archive (MB), the collection comprises around 6,000 items and takes up seven linear meters of physical storage space. The ephemera functioned as a portal into the evolution of Christchurch's theatrical and concert music history, giving weight to the collection as a rich local historical resource worthy of keeping. The ephemera reflected how British, European, and American cultural practices were infused into colonial Christchurch's theatrical and concert music scene. The collection also revealed a tradition of UC teachers who, since its establishment in 1873 as Canterbury College, actively shaped, participated in, and facilitated the development of Christchurch's theatre and concert music heritage. Overall, the collection's research value was its localism. Different ways of engaging researchers with the ephemera were considered, in addition to identifying the transferable skills the intern gained. With growing interest from students about internships, the authors also address questions about long-term impact and scalability of cultural-heritage collection-based intern and/or classroom-based learning projects more generally. Our main message for higher education management and those charged with the custodianship of cultural heritage collections is that hands-on learning helps students appreciate and value these locally significant collections.Academic archivists and librarians understand the value of working with cultural heritage collections, such as ephemera, yet the size and scope of these often uncatalogued, closed-storage collections can deter access.

Building from an idea outlined in Libby Robin's landmark study How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), this article traces shifting European attitudes towards Ranunculus paucifolius, a rare subalpine buttercup, from 'strange and foreign' to 'familiar' then 'endangered'. I draw from fragments of historical evidence held in museums, botanic gardens, archives, and university teaching collections in order to understand how and why the Castle Hill buttercup became important to Canterbury's high country identity and in need of safeguarding. Since entering the Western scientific record, R. paucifolius has been observed growing in home gardens and botanic garden nurseries, as well as in the wild and in experimental nursery plots at Castle Hill, its only known habitat, between the Torlesse and Craigieburn ranges in the South Island of New Zealand. Organised around the themes of discovery, classification and conservation, this article unearths certain ambiguities and risks associated with the preservation of regionally and nationally significant plants, and highlights the evolving importance of indigenous flora in cultural memory.