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January/February 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Nunavut Feature: Royal Ontario Museum Feature: Hero school The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte

Past the hawk-eyed security guard at the wellhidden staff entrance to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) lies a winding warren of corridors. Off one hallway, storage rooms are cluttered with artifacts. Off another, prep labs smell of Krazy Glue. The bug room, infested with flesh-eating beetles, is where bones are sent to be picked clean. And upstairs in the natural history department, a handwritten sign notes: “It’s a jungle in here.” In museology-speak, this is the “back of the house,” home to the ROM’s curators and their research, the intellectual capital that provides the lifeblood of the museum’s exhibits.

The ROM is Canada’s largest museum of natural history and world cultures, with more than six million objects in its collection and up to one million visitors annually. Lately, the museum has received a lot of media attention for its edificebuilding facelift, an overhaul of exhibit spaces at the “front of the house.” Architect Daniel Libeskind designed an avant-garde — or ugly, depending on one’s taste — addition known as the Michael Lee- Chin Crystal, part of a $270 million renovation that set in motion a massive “Renaissance ROM” fundraising campaign.

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