As many of you would know using a roof space for archival storage presents a lot of challenges, however, the Justice and Police Museum have embraced the challenge and effected a stunning transformation.
May 2012 – Link Roundup
Some interesting links we have found on-line…war, ball gowns, social media and boxes. What does this have to do with Archives? Read on to find out.
3 Years for Archives Outside – Happy Birthday! And hello lurkers
Time flew and we nearly missed our birthday. We’ve both been busy with many things, including the “Aesthetics Committee”, a website overhaul and working on an archival storage project so this special day crept up on us quite unexpectedly.
There are nearly 350 posts and over 1300 comments on the blog. We’d like to say Thank You to everyone who visits, reads, guest posts, comments…and lurks. Yes, you! You know who we’re talking about.
Birthday day is also the official Archives Outside Annual Lurkers Day
Wikipedia has updated their definition from last year:
In Internet culture, a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing, social networking site, listening to people in VOIP calls … or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively. Research indicates that “lurkers make up over 90% of online groups”
So hello to you, you 90 percenter! Come and join the 10% who, as you have seen, are really very lovely and friendly. Try a comment in the box below and see what happens :-D
If you’d prefer to stay a lurker, don’t worry, you still can. One day you may feel that de-lurkification is possible.
Now, who’s helping to blow out the candles?
Can you date this photograph? [Hyde Park, Sydney]
Sydneysiders lapping up the sun in Hyde Park.
Can you date this photograph?
We have many other undated photographs in Photo Investigator and on our Flickr account. If know the dates or any other interesting facts about these images please let us know.
So our boss woke up at 3am … and this is what happened (an exhibition revival)
So our boss, State Records Deputy Director Jenni Stapleton, woke up at 3am one morning with a vision. This vision said rail, it said exhibition, it said Western Sydney Records Centre, it said Web 2.0 and it said website.
Articulating the vision. Note the good-looking Aesthetics Committee
The streaming thoughts on this morning at 3am ran something along these lines:
- We have a great public space out at the Western Sydney Records Centre (WSRC) and have been looking for ways to use it to promote our collection.
- So why not re-visit an exhibition that had previously hung at the State Records Gallery in the city office?
- This Gallery space will no longer exist once the city reading room closes on June 30.
- All this lovely past exhibition material is starting to make its way to the WSRC…how can we use it rather than store it?
Making the vision a reality
Step 1
Send an email out to all victims, sorry volunteers, congratulating them on their new membership to the “Aesthetics Committee” (carefully omitting the “Exhibition” word).
Committee Meeting (Meet the “Volunteers”)
Step 2
The committee meets to discuss this vision, some feeling a little trepidatious. They were not wrong to feel this way; there was a two week deadline for “vision realisation”.
Step 3
Scare the bejesus out of a member of the conservation team by turning up in the Conservation Lab with a humungous poster measuring two and a half metres long with a large dent punched almost all the way through from the back.
Humungous Feature Poster
Step 4
Conduct an expedition to discover and locate items from previous exhibitions (no small matter given the size of the complex at WSRC; it’s so big our retrieval staff clock up roughly 14km a day.
Store room of forgotten dreams
Step 5
Take supplies for long trek to store room…aha, we found display cases and a lounge, too!
Tally Ho! Lots of goodies unearthed
Step 6
The awesome team in digitisation work their magic and find some previously unused images for the exhibition. Blowing up postcard sized images to A3 sized posters proves challenging…
..but not impossible! Wonderful images
Step 7
The amazing team in conservation work their magic to fix holes and inadvertently become experts in double-sided tape application to mount posters onto thick card.
Our conservation team at work
Step 8
More members of the Committee convince a lovely roofing guy (who happened to be here with a drill, a level, and a tape measure) to hang the pictures and posters.
Lovely Roofing Guy
Other Committee members tackle the double-sided tape posters.
Easy said….right?
Smartphone levelling (yes, there’s an app for everything) …risky?
Yes, but successful! Go smartphone
Roof repairs also tackled.
Step 9
Clean out display cases and start filling them with items. Print out labels for all items.
Hands at work…careful now
And look what one committee member had hiding at home! Now proudly on display
Step 10
Go all out crazy and get a transparency poster printed up to hang on one of the front windows.
Transparent Vision
Installation in progress…bubbles prove to be persistent
Transparency Complete. Hasta la vista Bubbles
Step 11
Sit on lounge and rest
Vision Realised. No, don’t sleep…not again…didn’t she say this was just Phase One?
Date of Vision: 27 April 2012
Installation Complete: 14 May 2012
This was a great collaborative effort across the whole organisation with “Aesthetics Committee” members coming from the Executive, Digitisition, Conservation, Information and Communication, Archives Control and Public Access. Special mention to our Facilities Manager, everyone’s go-to guy. Oh, and the lovely roofing guy!
And yes, it was fun.
Go team!
Downstairs before installation
Downstairs – BEFORE
Downstairs after installation
Downstairs – AFTER
Upstairs before installation
Upstairs – BEFORE
Upstairs after installation
Upstairs – AFTER
Finishing touches
Finishing touches
Update July 2012: The Romance & Industry exhibition originally ran from August 2005 to February 2006 and was introduced in Vital Signs Issue 8 in the article Globalisation, Nostalgia & Cultural Heritage (PDF, 1.2mb). The Vital Signs magazine was published from March 2002 until September 2006 and had a significant impact on the cultural, archives and records management communities during the period.
The more things change …. (classic advice from the Archives c.1979)
The more things change the more they stay the same! A couple of weeks ago I was given an old procedure manual for the Government Records Repository, State Records semi-active records repository, which dates from 1979. It comes complete with some not so politically correct hand drawn illustrations. However, the real gem is to be found on page 13 (significant?) which shares that classic rite of passage for all trainee archivists and records professionals…..how to fold a Type 1 box.
Can you date this photograph? [Corrimal (NSW)]
A Class E17 locomotive at a level crossing in Corrimal, a northern suburb of Wollongong in NSW.
There are quite a few clues pointing to the date of this image.
Can you date this photograph?
We have many other undated photographs in Photo Investigator and on our Flickr account. If know the dates or any other interesting facts about these images please let us know.
We’re on Historypin
…and having fun!
You might remember last year we had a guest post from the friendly folks at Historypin who wrote about this exciting new way of viewing and sharing history.
From the post:
Historypin is a public history collaboration working with individuals and communities, in partnership with Google and over 100 institutions around the world, to share their collections and build community around local history.
One of the initiatives on Historypin for this year is to create a ‘global interactive archive’ of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II. Libraries, museums and archives dove into their collections looking for photos, documents, audio and video to pin the Queen’s history. Including us! You can see our contribution to the Jubilee here.
Diamond Jubilee ‘Tour’
Overlaying photos onto Google streetview
We’ve been adding non-Royal items, too. Being able to match, or almost match old photos onto Google streetview is quite a feat. A warning though: if you’re too heavy-handed in clicking through streetview, most likely due to over-enthusiasm, you may find you get a little sea-sick as you get through streetview at a rapid pace. For instance, it took a while pinning this image below of Bourke Street, Sydney – and it’s not even a perfect fit as I kept getting thrown into the Eastern Distributor tunnel if I clicked a little too far into the /streetmap.
By the way, this photo was a recent Moment in Time which has been identified as Bourke Street…thank you!
Matching topography…
Where streets have changed considerably over time the topography might help to match up content and the transparency slider comes in very handy for this. Below, is a 1929 view of Tamworth – Google maps showed just one original building still remained. So the building and the mountains in the background could be used as markers.
…and finding new information to update our catalogue
We also managed to determine the street in which this photo was taken (Brisbane Street) and update our catalogue as a result.
So far, joining Historypin has been a great experience. We’re also thinking of ways in which we can use this tool to create new types of exhibitions, ones that we have not had the technology to do undertake thus far. We’re very much looking forward to increased functionality which will allow us to overlay old maps onto the Google maps. Maps are one thing we have a lot of in our collection – can you imagine, with the transparency slider, fading in and out the old to the new.
Watch this space…
More about Historypin
April 2012 – Link Roundup
Some handy links we have found online…….