Six years ago, the Flemish universities of Leuven (KULeuven), Ghent (UGent), Antwerp (UA) and Brussels (VUB) created an interuniversity platform for academic heritage. Staff at all four institutions began to set out a common strategy to protect the academic treasures gathering dust in their spare rooms. With funding from the Flemish government’s arts and heritage agency, they set up a two-year project.

The first step consisted of making an inventory of the universities’ collections, which should be presented to culture minister Joke Schauvliege after the summer. In a second phase, the universities want to professionalise the management of the collections and devise a strategy to bring the information to the public. The development of a website is a crucial objective, but some universities also plan to establish exhibitions. Another goal is the integration of the collections of university colleges.

A thorough search of departments brought to the surface a hundred or so collections: about one million objects in total. “There are, however, surely many more that remained hidden from our view,” says professor Geert Vanpaemel of KULeuven.

Nostalgic urges

“Young researchers often lack an interest in tools that are not up to date; in many cases they consider it old junk. But thankfully there are senior scientists who take care of the material out of nostalgia.”

The difficult question now arising is how to choose what to preserve, because there is neither the space nor the money to store everything. In particular, KULeuven and UGent have amassed a large collection during their long history. Important criteria are a piece’s uniqueness in the region, its representativeness for a period in scientific history, its role in a university’s history, its attractiveness to the general public and its lasting scientific relevance.

“A collection of beetles from the 19th century may seem scientifically irrelevant on first sight,” says Vanpaemel, “but by investigating their level of pollution with modern techniques, they can still provide information on the environmental evolution in a region.”

In Ghent’s zoology museum, you can still admire the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, although the species became extinct in the 1930s. “This stuffed animal is one of the last traces of this species in the world,” says Isabel Rotthier, UGent’s main archivist.

Road to discovery

For Frank Scheelings, who leads the VUB’s archive, the material can be essential in raising awareness of the long processes involved in science. At the headquarters of the Inter-University Institute for High Energies, which unites teams from Brussels’ Flemish and French-speaking universities, intricate devices illustrate the road to the final discovery of the Higgs particle, from microscopes and projector tables to electronic equipment. One of VUB’s huge electron detectors was moved to research centre Cern’s museum in Geneva, where the particle was discovered this year.

VUB researcher Catherine De Clercq, who’s also part of Cern, still uses one of the old projector tables to explain to students the basics of examining the particles. “The technology may be old-fashioned and slow, but it teaches students the necessary skills for the research,” she says. “With the purely digital method, you don’t get this close contact with the study objects.”

The university also has a valuable collection of robotics and medical and electromotor technology. At UA, a six-metre-high electron microscope shows how high-tech instruments have decreased in size over the last decades.

Mad scientists

Sometimes, professors create their own collections throughout their career, such as the Flemish physiologist Corneel Heymans of UGent. Heymans won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1938 and was also the mentor of Paul Janssen, the founder of Janssen Pharmaceutica – now a world-leading pharmaceutical company. “We need to protect the collections of such pioneers,” says Rotthier. “Heymans is one of the academics who determined UGent’s reputation.”

Another influential UGent professor is physicist Joseph Plateau, the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. Plateau invented the phenakistoscope, an early animation device. “Films are now a normal part of our daily life,” says Rotthier, “but his collection demonstrates how film was developed in the 19th century.”

At KULeuven, the collection of professor Albert Michotte brings to mind the workshop of the stereotypical mad inventor. In 1894 Michotte established the laboratory of experimental psychology and constructed many of the curious instruments with his own hands. Visitors can examine 200 ingenious tools at a permanent exhibition in the library of the faculty of psychology and pedagogical sciences in Leuven.

They have names just as strange as their appearances: You can see, for example, the olfactometer van Zwaardemaker, the tamboer van Marey and an ophtalmotroop.

In Ghent, a peculiar collection is the Imaginair Museum Dierick: Hieronymous Bosch, exhibited at culture and congress centre Het Pand. The collection consists of a series of colour pictures from parts of Bosch’s paintings, taken by professor Alfons Dierick.

Studying at the museum

In a few rare cases, collections of academic heritage have already been exhibited to the public. There is the HistarUZ museum in Leuven, which illustrates almost a century of activity at the University Hospital Leuven. The Museum for the History of Sciences, in Ghent, illustrates the history of different science disciplines via technological progress in instruments.

But most other “museums” at universities can only be visited by making an appointment and serve a purely educational purpose. “The original meaning of a museum is a ‘study space’,” says Geert Vanpaemel of KULeuven. “Our Museum for Zoology, for example, in the first place is meant to help students.”

The ambitions of the different universities in reaching the public differ greatly. UA, which in its current form has only existed for a decade, has a collection dating back to the end of the 1960s. Trudi Noordermeer, UA’s chief librarian, admits that they are only beginning to establish an academic heritage policy but sees many opportunities for co-operation with university colleges in the region.

The Antwerp Maritime Academy, for example, has an impressive collection of navigation devices that could attract marine enthusiasts. Noordermeer doesn’t believe a museum with academic heritage will soon be established in Antwerp, but thinks that the expansion of the website dedicated to the topic is an important step.

The VUB, which split from its French-speaking counterpart at the end of the 1960s, will soon have a depot where academic heritage from all departments can be stored. Co-ordinator Frank Scheelings hopes that in future, exhibitions can be set up in planned buildings that will comprise student rooms and a socio-cultural hub.

Vanpaemel of KULeuven realises it’s important that each university gets an overview of its own collection and identity but feels Flanders should organise its academic heritage on a regional level – after the Dutch example. He envisions a central heritage centre with managers that are not affiliated to any university, who can make neutral decisions with attention to the historical value of heritage.

The university with the biggest plans is UGent. For its 200th anniversary in 2017, the university wants to open a new university museum, which will bring together prestigious pieces of various heritage collections. The new museum will be at the science faculty, next to the city’s botanical garden. The new touristic hotspot will show the influence of science on society. “For example, how the invention of the transistor in the 1950s revolutionised the field of electronics and paved the way for our current smartphone and GPS,” says co-ordinator Danny Segers, also director of the Museum for the History of Sciences.

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