Oesper Digital Collections

Staring in 2010, the museum began publishing a bimonthly feature called Museum Notes to highlight specific artifacts in the collections. Although items in the book and journal collection and the photo and print collection have been included, most featured objects are from the apparatus museum. To date, 58 issues of Museum Notes have been posted in the UC Digital Resource Commons.

These occasional notes highlight items and topics of interest in the Oesper Collections in the History of Chemistry, and were prepared by Dr William Jensen.

View the Museum Notes in the UC Digital Resource Commons here.

Like most museums, only about 25% of the holdings of the Oesper Collections in the History of Chemistry are on public display at a given time. In order to make the remaining 75% available in some form, it was decided to initiate a series of short museum booklets, each dedicated to a particular instrument or laboratory technique of historical importance to the science of chemistry. Each booklet would include not only photographs of both displayed and stored museum artifacts related to the subject at hand, but also a short discussion of the history of the instrument or technique and of its impact on the development of chemistry as a whole. Several of these booklets are expansions of short articles which have previously appeared in either the bimonthly series Museum Notes, which is posted on the Oesper website, or the series "Ask the Historian," which appeared in the Journal of Chemical Education between 2003 and 2012.

View the Museum Booklets in the UC Digital Resource Commons here.

 Six rare books in the Oesper Library collection have been digitized and are accessible from the UC Digital Resource Commons.