#Symposium

This year the Cody Firearms Museum hosted the third annual Kurt Swanson Bucholz Arsenals of History Symposium in Cody, Wyoming. We saw the gathering of many historians, researchers, and representatives from a wide range of museums throughout the world. All congregating together to discuss such topics as to how we research and interpret firearms history to looking forward in the digital age with how to classify small arms lexicons and even incorporating video games into the museum experience.

Taking the lead by the Cody Firearms Museum, a unique gathering of firearms museum curators took place in Cody, Wyoming. Representatives from museums such as the National Firearms Centre in Leeds, Springfield Armory National Historic Site, NRA Firearms Museum, Autry Museum of the West, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Armed Forces Gun Room, National Museum of the Marine Corps, and many other fascinating museums that have a sizable small arms collection showed up to talk guns. For the second year in a row this varied and diverse group of folks discussed the ins and outs of some of the more peculiar difficulties of curating firearms in museums. How do you work in a severely challenging political climate? How do you deal with NFA pieces that come in as unregistered? To what extent are researchers allowed in the collection? What are the ethics of restoring museum pieces?

Held for the second time at the Cody Firearms Museum in Wyoming, the Arsenals of History Symposium is unique in that it is the first series of symposiums specifically devoted to the field of firearms museum curators. Attendees included chief curatorial staff from the NRA National Firearms Museum, Springfield Armory National Historic Site, Royal Armouries National Firearms Collection, Smithsonian Gun Room, in addition to many more from across the country and internationally. The event was sponsored and hosted by the Cody Firearms Museum’s curator’s Ashley Hlebinsky and Daniel Michael, in addition to help from the whole Cody team.

Although the first day of the symposium was free to the general public, the next two days required a $50 entrance fee (total) and was aimed at getting curators private time amongst themselves to discuss serious and legitimate issues that affected the care of their small arms collections. Note that if you are a small arms researcher and historian interested in attending the conference, you should be able to pay this fee and be apart of these conversations and presentations next year.