Val Berryman puts away newly cataloged items for the MSU Museum’s collection Tuesday morning at the Central Services building. About 95 percent of the museum’s collection is from donations.
The MSU Museum is celebrating its 150-year anniversary in 2007, and though that might seem like an unimaginable amount of time to some, Val Berryman can help put it into perspective.
Berryman, 67, has worked at the museum for 45 years – almost one-third of the museum’s life span. He first started as a part-time employee during his senior year at MSU in 1962 and moved to full-time upon graduation.
Times are changing
For 42 of those years, Berryman has held the title of curator of history, and in his four decades he’s seen the museum change in some pretty historic ways.
In particular, Berryman said computers allow more efficient cataloging of artifacts, though he said he still prefers the actual cards.
Berryman said when he first started at the museum, the labeling for artifacts was done by prison inmates.
“They’d send (the labels) to Jackson Prison and one of the prisoners would set the type, print the labels, and they’d mail them back to us. And then if we found a typo or a mistake you’d have to start the process all over again,” he said.
The changes have been for the better, Berryman said.
“(The exhibits) have gotten more professional,” he said. “Now we really try harder to get an interesting theme. We try to appeal to a wider audience or a specialized audience to make sure that all of our visitors are finding something that would be of interest to them.”
The museum also has expanded its reach nationally, something that Kurt Dewhurst, the museum director since 1983, said he was proud of.
“We see our museum as a museum operating without walls,” Dewhurst said. “We have over 20 traveling exhibits that travel across Michigan and across the United States to different museums and settings.”
The Smithsonian connection
In 2001, the museum was made a Smithsonian Institution affiliate – the first in Michigan to receive the distinction. This affiliation functions in a research-sharing capacity, connecting museums and other scientific organizations across the country to benefit from their collective knowledge.
Richard Kurin, under secretary of history and culture at the Smithsonian, came from the nation’s Capitol this week to speak at a few events on campus.
Kurin, author of a book on the Hope Diamond, the Smithsonian’s most-viewed artifact, held a lecture and book signing at the Kellogg Center this week. He also will speak to museum studies majors today, finishing with a lecture at the museum’s History and Hope event, an award ceremony for donors and volunteers this evening.
Lora Helou, communications manager for the MSU Museum, said the museum was fortunate to have Kurin visit campus.
“He’s a really dynamic scholar and speaker, and he’s head of the (Smithsonian) affiliation our museum’s a part of,” Helou said.
In addition to having Kurin speak, the museum also has had an exhibit on display for several months to commemorate the anniversary.
The exhibit, titled “Michigan State University Museum: 150 Years of Discovery,” shows how the museum collects, preserves, studies and interprets artifacts of the natural world.
Some of the artifacts include a skeleton of a young Asian elephant that was first displayed in the 1890s, on view again for the first time in nearly 40 years, as well as representatives of some of MSU’s earliest collections of taxidermy.
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“We wanted something that was a little more easy to absorb,” said Berryman, who was in charge of the exhibit. “We weren’t really trying to tell the entire 150-year history of the museum, we were just trying to get an idea of some highlights.”
Keeping track
As curator of history, Berryman spends the majority of his time cataloguing new donations, cleaning artifacts in storage, checking out potential donations and rearranging the museum’s changing galleries, which happens about every six months.
The museum can only display about 5-percent of what they own at any given time, so he constantly rotates the exhibits.
“We do exhibits all over campus,” he said. “I’ve been doing exhibits for vet medicine, we have one by the Dairy Store with antique dairy processors. We try to get the stuff out to as many different places as we can.”
Although the amount of artifacts in storage is enormous, Mike Smola, a graduate student in the museum studies program, said Berryman knows the details on almost everything.
“Because of his long tenure here at the MSU Museum, he is a type of institutional memory in the flesh,” Smola said. “He has an amazing memory for who donated what and the story behind almost any object that I ask about.”
This knowledge comes in handy, especially when navigating through the countless aisles of artifacts in storage, which includes everything from old MSU athletic uniforms and trophies to antique cars and farming equipment.
The future
Though not the oldest museum employee, Berryman’s worked there the longest – in fact, the longest of any employee in the history of the museum – a record he doesn’t think will be broken.
“Most people are more willing to move on to other things, but I’ve always really loved the job,” Berryman said.
Smola said Berryman has been an asset to the museum.
“It’s going to be a sad day for the MSU Museum when he retires,” he said. “The museum will be losing a great resource for history in general, the history of the museum and the history of MSU.”
Berryman said he doesn’t have plans of retiring anytime soon and will keep working for as long as he’s able.
“I feel a great deal of pride in the stuff that I’ve been able to preserve,” he said. “I’ve gone around campus and taken stuff out of dumpsters even to keep it from getting lost and then eventually making use of it, so it’s been a rewarding job.”
Does Berryman have any plans of being around for the 200-year anniversary of the museum?
“I’ll only be 117, so if I take my vitamins I think I can make it,” he said.
