Moving Right Along

This does not mean we have died and gone to Heaven - although from the last post yoou might think so. It means we have moved along after a successful audit of the front of the Funeral Parlour, to the last place catalogued in the 1990s. We are working in the Sunny Creek School, with The Ducks and Lizards.

Once we have finished there, we will have checked all the cataloguing that was done in the 1990s. Which will be a considerable relief. It has only taken about three and a half years to work through it, while working on other areas as well.

Working with things like this, which has just come in.

Looking at it, we think it is a lifter for taking boiled eggs out of boiling water. It has been in the donor's family for so many years, that they do not know what it is. Maybe, if you wanted to keep your eggs warm at the breakfast table, instead of an egg cosy, if there were a lot of people, they were kept in warm water. And this was used to lift out the egg you wanted?

So that is the best we can come up with - any suggestions, anyone?

What? You don't know what an egg cosy is? It is like a tea cosy, only smaller. We have one in the collection.

Imagine coming down to breakfast to find the maid had cosily put your egg in this. It even has lovely pink flowers on the other side. No fishing in the water for you, to get your own egg.

We are very, very Excited

We are very, very excited. After waiting about two-and-a-half years (which included a number of attempts), a significant number of the items from our Collection are up on CAN.

To see them, just go to the Search Screen, type in "Gippstown" (but without the "talkies") and you can go through them. Don't forget to click on the link to see more details of an item in which you have an interest.

There have been just a few teething problems, where some of our images do not show up (but we can solve that with time), and some come up a number of times, page after page.

But overall, it is really wonderful.

Many, many thanks to Ingrid Mason from CAN and her anonymous XML wizard.

Part of the problem was that we were unsure how to provide an InMagic input for CAN - now solved and we are hopeful the next batch will be up there much sooner.

Thanks Ingrid!

Sue the School Ma'am

The cataloguing team has been talking a little bit with Sue, Old Gippstown's School Ma'am. Sue is on deck to march the children into our school by the bus load (well, in small groups that total a bus load), adn lead them through lessons as they would have been many years ago.

She is especially interested in the old school readers, so we have been checking how many we have.

When she is not in the school, Sue is gardening in our Veggie Garden, where her husband Rob has been (in between everything else), edging the garden beds. Sue has just joined Flickr, so you can see her photos on her page - including the garden as it progresses. She is also loading them to the Old Gippstown Flickr Group - more posters there are always most welcome!

Thanks Sue!

Can anyone recognise this scene?

Ever since this cataloguing team started, about four years ago, this long-stitch embroidery has had us puzzled.

You can see a slightly larger version of the photograph HERE.

It appears to be a faithful rendition in wool, with some cotton, of a colonial harbour scene. The framing is quite old. There are flags on some of the buildings and ships, that do not really equate to any that we can recognise. There also appear to be icebergs in the distance in the harbour.

We have always wondered if it is supposed to be a faithful depiction of an actual scene. One knowledgeable person who has examined it feels that the clouds are similar to those rendered by engravers - meaning this could have been copied from an engraving.

So, does anyone know this scene?

Here is a detail - we would really appreciate knowing more about this work. We have just taken it from storage and placed it in one of the bedrooms in Ashdale.

Object of the Week

We have rebadged the Old Gippstown blog (not this blog, which is the Cataloguers blog), as Old Gippstown Object of the Week.

If there is anyone out there who would like to write up their favourite object (we will handle the photos), feel free. This is the chance to tell everyone about some obscure, favourite item in the collection.

We are over there as I write, looking at Shears. This set of Shears.

News from the Store

We had a very successful InMagic day with Barbara Kowalski from Maxus last week, getting into the nitty gritty of our Cataloguing. Seven user-groups were represented, and we hope to meet again in six months' time.

So now your faithful Cataloguing Team has returned to working away in the Narracan General Store. So there is not a lot of news. Except we thought you might be interested in seeing some of the items that we have found in the store, that are ear-marked for elsewhere in the park.

This is a good example of a piece of World War II "Trench Art" - souvenirs made by soldiers (and airmen, and sailors), from items to hand, designed to be sent home. We have located a photograph of the same plane on another example, so think there may have been a common mould for the plane, with the ash tray section being of much rougher construction. Anyone else have a similar one, or any thoughts? There is a larger version of the photo HERE. This piece is off to go into the Military Collection.

We were a little taken with this strainer, as it is made from perforated metal, not the mesh we are more familiar with. There are probably numerous examples in museums all over the place, but we thought it would be good to get it into a kitchen display, where it can shine a little more. Our main problem is that we do not have a lot of good, secure kitchen exhibition space. Our best one is the kitchen at the rear of the Cobb and Co building, but a lot of people miss walking around there. So we are looking for a good place to display it.

This souvenir plate shows a view of Commercial Road in Morwell, not yet dated. Items like this are becoming collectable (read "portable", which means at risk of being lifted). Maybe the best place for this piece is in the Camera display - as an example of one of the many mediums on which photographs can be found. And one of the few places where we have glass cases. It is hard to interpret buildings as if people lived in them, if they are full of glass cases.

Items like this are also a challenge for collections which have several databases to record their holdings. Is this a photograph? Is it an "object"? Which database does it go into? We are fortunate that we only have one database, for everything, so it just goes in their and we find it if we are searching for photographs of Morwell, or if we are searching for souvenir plates. Makes life much simpler.

Of This and That

We have been hard at work, those of us who catalogue the collection - and move things around, and set up displays. Ollie has been at work in the Neerim Post Office, which finally has a set of letters pigeonholes. They are still to be found in very small town post offices, where everyone goes to the post office to collect their mail - there is no delivery. They collect all the latest news and gossip at the same time. For some reason there was never one installed in the Neerim Post Office when that display was set up. We are looking for old letters, as we don't have a lot of that sort of ephemera.

We were up in the loft, and realised the pigeonholes used to store odd bits and pieces (think Tinsmith Collection), was actually from the Narracan Post Office. When the store came in the post office wing wasn't collected - but the pigeonholes obviously were. The names of the locals are still written on their spaces. And it looks better than this from the other side of the grille - just it cannot be photographed from there.

We are cataloguing all sorts of things at the minute - as we sort out the Narracan Store, items removed from there have to be catalogued as they go out the front door. So we at least know where we found them. Things like these "Kling Tite" bathers, which are going out into textile storage.

Which only goes to show that we are cataloguing all sorts of different items, all the time. So it was interesting to see the release of the latest edition of the Small Museums Cataloguing Manual the other day (there is a link on that link to download a copy). The Manual is now managed by Museums Australia (Victoria), with funding from Heritage Victoria.

Our system is based on the second edition of the Manual (the c.1990 model). That was the old "one sheet fits all" model. The next one (1996) came along with all sorts of different sheets, for images, for objects etc etc. We stayed right where we were - just being ultra-consistent with how we made entries. So now we have the 2009 (4th edition), and are back to one sheet again.

It makes a really interesting read. Nice illustrations too (although we wondered if anyone shown in it was under sixty). Some things we agree with and act in accordance with, others we do not. For example, to suggest that the Team Leader - Cataloguing, should be the only one to do the computer entry, is a little unrealistic in our case. Does the TLC ever get to do anything else? Although in our case the TLC does edit and review every new entry.

Which is a long way around saying that we are looking for someone to join us to do data entry. We will be working on Fridays until the end of the year at least - so if you would like to come and be part of our team, please contact Old Gippstown. We could also use a dedicated photographer as well. Any takers?