The Museum That Queen’s Gave Away: Rediscovering the Queen’s Museum of Near Eastern Archaeology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On October 26th 1954, a Museum of Near Eastern Archaeology opened in the Old Arts Building (modern Theological Hall), the home of Queen’s Theological College. The Museum had been conceived of and executed by Dr. A. Douglas Tushingham, a Biblical Archaeologist and scholar of Old Testament criticism, who came to work at the College as professor. The Museum only remained open for a little over one year, until Dr. Tushingham, who had left Queen’s to accept a job with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), requested the items. Both Theological College and Queen’s University subsequently agreed to dismantle the museum and transfer the materials to the ROM, where the items remain today. This project reveals how the Museum came into being, what its function at Queen’s was, and the context surrounding the sudden and tragic loss of such a culturally and educationally significant collection. The research collected has come from a variety of news sources, online publications, and archival material provided by Queen’s Archives and the ROM Registration Department. As a result of this study, I and my professor (Dr. Barbara Reeves) are establishing through Queen’s Library an online exhibit featuring items from the original museum, as a way of amending the past and providing the educational resources initially intended through the museum’s establishment. The story of this museum, and the journey its collections took, raises important questions in the field of Museum Studies such as the responsibility cultural institutions have to promote cultural heritage, and the importance of modernizing 21st century collections to include online databases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".