CONCLUSION: UNIVERSITY/UNIVERSE

A university aims to contain all that is worth knowing, organizing the natural world and human endeavor within its different departments and faculties. This organized knowledge is most obviously stored in the library, which offers the accumulation of human knowledge uniformly and neutrally in its books and shelves. But this is only part of the picture. Behind the walls lie scores of collections of things, owned by the university, by departments and professors, which are both the subjects of research and the tools of education. The diverse objects of knowledge, normally dispersed across campus, sometimes hidden away in closets, are usually unseen by anyone except specialists.

We are poised in a moment of transition, engaged in a headlong plunge into cyberspace, where knowledge in created, stored and spread electronically. Our understanding of the world is bound to change as a result, just as it did in the sixteenth century, when oral and handwritten culture gave way to the world of the printed book. That was also the time when the first microcosmic collections of objects--Curiosity Cabinets--were formed to play an important part in the origins of the modern university. This seems an ideal moment to celebrate this history and examine its consequences by looking back at these wonderful and bizarre collections of "curiosities," and by considering the way we use things today.

{Essays} {Gallery} {Microcosms}