CAMBRIDGE.- Girton College opened its newly refurbished small museum, the Lawrence Room, this weekend.

The completion of this significant project means that the College's wide range of important artefacts and antiquities are now on show in their full glory, in state-of-the-art display cases, and with fully-supporting information.

The new display highlights the ways in which the collection has grown in the years since the foundation of the College.

There are three major collections, namely Anglo-Saxon, Egyptian and Mediterranean, which include significant, and in some cases unique, pieces such as Hermione Grammatike, a named portrait mummy from the Fayum region of Egypt, dating back to Roman times.

Girton has acquired many of these interesting exhibits from its benefactors and supporters. However, the Anglo-Saxon material came from a cemetery excavated on the College site in 1881.

As part of this project, a complete, illustrated electronic catalogue of the collections is being developed, which will eventually be available on the Internet.

The refurbishment will help to preserve the Lawrence Room's collections for the benefit of future generations, and its reorganisation and electronic catalogue will enhance access for teaching and research.

The Lawrence Room appeal was launched in 2007 to raise funds for the housing, conservation, cataloguing and display of these collections.

Generous donations have enabled the acquisition of new display cabinets and, as a consequence, some of the Anglo-Saxon and Roman material from the 1881 dig on the Girton site has returned to the College from the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, where it had been held on loan since its discovery.

Mistress of the College, Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, said: "Many Old Girtonians and outside experts have given generously of their time and skill in aiding this significant undertaking. We are confident that the Lawrence Room will prove to be an outstanding resource for teaching and research."