For example, I'm looking at finding a specific collection dedicated to James Hutton, the founder of modern geology. He was Scottish and as such I would assume there must be a small collection or exhibit on his history and works at the National Museum of Scotland located in Edinburgh as there is for such things as the 'Heddle Collection.'
There must be something, some collection dedicated to J. Hutton... yet I can't find one anywhere. How do you go about finding a collection dedicated to a specific individuals works?
All I have found is this.
Thanks in advance
I can understand your confusion. Most museum collections aren't accessible online yet. It is happening, but considering how many items are in collections, in addition to how time consuming and expensive putting a collection online is, the work is going slowly.
In addition, the National Museum of Scotland could well have put on a Hutton exhibit sometime in the past, but that may not have been preserved for posterity when the time came for exhibits to be rotated.
Luckily, I think I have found the sort of thing you are looking for. Unluckily, it appears most of his specimen collection at least got tossed in the 1800s. Here is an article from the Annals of Science, Volume 41, Issue 3, 1984 titled The Geological Collection of James Hutton. I'm going to quote the summary of the article here:
After Hutton's death it was given to the Royal Society of Edinburgh which, however, under the terms of its charter, was obliged to lodge it in the Natural History Museum of the University. The Museum's curator, the Wernerian, Robert Jameson, thought the collection of little account, and neither displayed it nor kept it together. By the mid-1830s most of it had been dispersed or thrown away, and nothing is known of it since. The list of specimens compiled by its first trustees has also disappeared.
Whether many/any of his personal artifacts survived I do not know, but this article might be a helpful starting point. In the absence of this sort of information though, the only thing left to do is to contact various museums and ask if we have items related to him. Either a curator related to the subject, or a collections manager would be your best bet.
Good luck!
http://goo.gl/WgSkRn sadly it is not a very interesting road, just a service lane really. However it is just opposite Holyrood Park where he did a lot of his work and very close to Our Dynamic Earth.
