The UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History will be the new home to a major collection of Arctic artifacts, according to an agreement between the University of Oregon and Western Oregon University, and thanks to support from the 2013 Oregon Legislature. 

The collection of more than 5,000 objects comes to the UO museum from the Jensen Arctic Museum at Western Oregon, where it has been housed since 1985.

At the heart of the collection are rare Alaskan artifacts donated by the museum's founder Paul Jensen, who died in September 1994. Jensen Museum curator Roben Itchoak said that the collection has since been supplemented by multiple donors, making it one of the largest assemblages of Arctic artifacts in the United States.

Western Oregon decided to cease operation of the Jensen Museum this year due to funding challenges. As Oregon's repository for state-owned anthropological collections, the UO museum was asked to house the Jensen Collection to keep it intact and preserve it as a public resource.

- from a story by the UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History