Brita Brenna notes in her article 'The Frames of Specimens' that Brunchorst was 'hired in 1886 as a curator in the botanical deprtment in Bergen Museum... He was particularly eager to reform and reorder the museum, and became the first secretary to the natural history department and later the first director of the museum itself. Brunchorst, born in Bergen, had studied plant physiology at various universities in Germany before being appointed curator of the botanical collection. Throughout the 1890s, the museum's activity was fervent, and Brunchorst was taking the lead.' (45)

She further highlights the way in which Brunchorst advocated expanding and re-arranging the museum collection: 'The need for more satsfying storage and exhibition space was an important argument justifying an increase in the budget. "In the coming years," wrote Brunchorst, "it is just as necessary to have money at disposal for a more extensive translocation in the collection, to procure new and rebuild older cupboards and glass cases. When a collection grows and time passes, sooner or later there will occur a moment when it is no longer possible to push the new artefacts between the older ones, when the whole arrangement has to be modified, the glass cases to a large extent rebuilt and changed, if good order should be sustained.'... If we look at Brunchorst's... writings on the topic, it becomes evident that the refurbishing of the department was closely connected to new, broader visions for museums in general, and to a new role for the zoological specimens held and displayed by those museums in particular.' (45-46) In 1892, 'Brunchorst presented, in a draft to his peers, a plan for the reorganization of the natural history department of Bergen Museum. The new order he wanted was based on his ambition to make the objects mpre instructive for "the most numerous public to the museum," as he sajd, while making more space available for the collection... the main tenet of this plan was to divide the collection in two, with the scie.tific collections divided from the pedagogical exhibits. Some objects would be "textbook material," others the basis for research. Brunchorst had listened carefully to leading international voices, not least of which the director of the natural history department of the British Museum, William Henry Flower... the division emphasised by Brunchorst, following up on Flower... [proposed] two different kinds of museum nature... in the public space there should be specimens prepared.in the best way, artistically and with a strong focus on their appearance. In the research department on the other hand, the objects come in two types: first, the valuable type specimens that have formed the basis for the description of the species, and second, as part of a series in which the individual object is interesti.g i. Its minor differences from the next.' (47-49)

Brita Brenna notes in her article 'The Frames of Specimens' that 'The promising young student Nansen had been hired as a curator at the museum in 1882, at the age of twenty-one... The aspirations of Bergen Museum suffused the rhetoric of the young scientist.' (42)