The University of Michigan is credited for providing renowned resources for its students and University community, as well as hosting many impressive museums open to the public. Most well-known museums, such as the art and natural history museums, give visitors the chance to observe and explore artifacts of interest, from dinosaur bones to Hudson River School landscape paintings. But other less-known museums on campus contribute to important academic research and feed niche interests.
The U-M Museum of Zoology, the Herbarium, the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology are not open to the public, but serve an important role in the research produced at the University and in the storage and preservation of their collections.
The Research Museums Center houses the four museums and provides space for the collections to be preserved properly. Hernán López-Fernández, associate chair of the UMMZ and Herbarium, told The Michigan Daily that the Research Museums Center is an invaluable resource to the museums across campus despite operating largely behind the scenes.
“The Research Museums Center is a really phenomenal infrastructure for all four museums to function,” López-Fernández said. “It’s a space that has been designed basically from the ground up to respond to the infrastructural needs of our collections in their different requirements and capacity.”
