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A Museum Full of Antiquities Embraces Modernity

Visitors at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, which is undertaking efforts to broaden its appeal.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Visitors to the Penn Museum might never see the red clay tablet. Little bigger than the palm of a hand, it sits on a metal cart in a back room.

Covered with indented rows of tiny characters, the Sumerian tablet dates from about 2700 B.C., and it is the world’s first known written account of the biblical flood. When not on its cart for visitors to see and handle, it is stored, like many of the museum’s one million other objects, in stacks of metal drawers accessible only to academics and other researchers.

The museum, formally called the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has over the years become an internationally renowned treasure trove for scholars researching ancient civilizations. Now to mark its 125th anniversary, and its founding on Dec. 6, 1887, the museum is undertaking an ambitious effort to become more accessible to the public.

“We want to harness the incredible intellectual wattage, and to find ways to translate it to a much wider appeal,” said its new director, Julian Siggers, in an interview. “I don’t think that first-rate research is incompatible with a wide public mandate.”

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Tessa de Alarcon, a conservator at the museum, photographed sculptures for a digital archive.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

Dr. Siggers, who until July was vice president for programs, education and content communication at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, said he aims to triple the Penn Museum’s current number of visitors, about 250,000 a year, within 10 years, and to raise the appeal of its contents by highlighting their relevance to modern life.

A current show, for example, draws on recent speculation in the news media that the Mayan calendar indicates an apocalypse in December 2012. The show debunks that idea but uses the opportunity to educate visitors about many aspects of Mayan civilization, including its intricate calendars, and does so using technology like interactive screens that invite visitors to create their own Mayan names.

The museum could also focus on climate change by using its collection and expertise to tell the story of how, some 10,000 years ago in the Levant, in the Middle East, overgrazing by goats removed topsoil, causing a change in the microclimate, Dr. Siggers said.

Or the collections could be used to create thematically linked exhibitions, he said, like one that would identify common features between current Western civilization and those of Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia.

“We want to see more of the continuity of the human story, to have galleries interconnected where you can see how one culture interrelates to the other,” Dr. Siggers said.

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Egyptian mummy heads were on view during restoration work by staff members.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

In the 1950s, the museum enjoyed a higher public profile through a TV show broadcast on CBS, “What in the World?” It had a quiz-show format in which experts were shown objects from the museum’s collection and tried to identify them.

Future visitors will probably find the museum’s riches highlighted in more multimedia shows that eschew traditional interpretive labels and cabinets in favor of interactive exhibits that focus on their relevance to viewers’ lives and use modern technology to achieve that.

Among current public outreach efforts is “Imagining Africa,” an exhibition that suggests alternative themes for future shows using the museum’s collection of 20,000 African objects as well as the skeletal remains of 72 slaves. Visitors are invited to write their reactions on white boards next to each proposal.

Frances Aulston, president of the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, which brought groups to the show, said it had introduced some aspects of African culture to African-American visitors, many of whom had never visited the museum.

“Many people had never been inside before,” she said. “It was eye-opening.”

While other university museums are discussing ways of broadening their appeal, Penn has taken an unusually proactive approach, said Dan Rahimi, vice president of gallery development at the Royal Ontario Museum.

“It’s absolutely appropriate and unusual to say the least for a university museum to be even talking about opening itself up to the public,” he said.

Despite the new openness, at least 95 percent of the museum’s vast collection remains out of sight in climate-controlled lockers and basements that house items like a 19th-century Alaskan child’s seal-intestine coat and Iron Age figurines from Cyprus.

But such items are becoming digitally available on the museum’s database, which so far contains records and images representing about 665,000 objects, allowing virtual access to items that would otherwise remain off-limits to the public.

Dr. Siggers hopes that the increased exposure to the museum’s rich collections will give people a new understanding of world history and culture.

“It can make you change the way you view the world,” he said. “It’s a lofty ambition, but that’s the goal.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: A Museum Full of Antiquities Embraces Modernity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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