Welcome to Emerald

This is a big and happy welcome to Emerald Historical Museum and Nobelius Heritage Park, who have entered the world of blogging. Click on their name to go to their brand new blog - you can even post a welcome should you feel inclined.

Emerald is in the beautiful Dandenongs, and a neighbour to Gippsland.

Issues in restoration

We are still powering through the collection in the Post Office, and this telephone, above, really shows the issues we have to deal when considering restoration or altering the state of an item as we find it.

This is a Geelong Automatic Exchange Telephone of c.1912-1920. It is one of Australia's iconic telephones, being from the first automatic exchange in the country, and much sought after by collectors.

This one has the original receiver / earpiece, although the cover for it is missing. The transmitter/mouthpiece, is from a different telephone. Some parts are missing inside, but not many. It needs a good clean.

We have been receiving exceptional help from Bob Mills of the Australasian Telephone Collectors Society. Collectors view items differently to collections such as ours - we try and preserve the item in the state in which we find it, as that state often tells the story of the item. Collectors try to find the missing pieces, and return it to original. They restore items. In this case Bob would repaint the box - we would clean it, but leave scratches and cracked paint. It has had other paint slopped on it - I'm still not sure what I would do with that.

This is an iconic and important piece, and we should apply the maxim of "As much as necessary, but as little as possible". Any changes would take place only after very serious consideration and full documentation.

However there are a heap of lesser telephones in the collection - some just missing a bit off the winder, or with the wrong cord on them. Many of them are duplicated. Those I wouldn't have a problem adding missing pieces - as long as it went through an appropriate process of consideration of the significance of the item first, and it was documented. Whatever we did would have to be reversible - we would have to be able to remove the piece again.

But it is really important not to varnish even them, for example, if they were originally oiled and not varnished. I really have a problem with varnishing anything, actually. It is not really reversible, and removes the integrity of the item. It just tarts them up, and obscures any story that the object might be telling. Fair wear and tear does not detract from the story of an item - it often adds to it.

In passing, was everyone watching the Conservators at the British Museum last week, removing all the paint and additions applied by those who thought they were doing the best thing restoring the Roman (or was it Greek?) statue?

Which isn't to say that Collectors are wrong in what they are doing - their aim is to present an item in what they see as its optimum condition - there is plenty of room in the world for us both. Especially when they are as sharing with their information.

We would never have known this was a handset from a Linesman's bag from around World War I, without Bob's help. I thought it was just a handpiece missing its telephone. Now I know it is a handpiece missing its bag, and I can picture it in use - thanks to a photograph from Bob of his.

LATE NOTE: The nearest and Dearest of a certain cataloguer has looked at this photograph (above), and identified it as a "Buttinski". It may have been called that as they were used to butt into a line to see if it was working - if anyone was talking. We think. It seems to be a universal name for the type of phone, when googled, although not many show up of this age.

Welcome Back Libby, and Stats

Libby is back and cataloguing. Full of wonderful stories of museums all over England and Scotland.

But she has buckled down quickly, and is working on the cups and saucers in Dr Andrew's house. Which unfortunately is still closed to the public while work is taking place on new partitions.

So it is time to review our stats, at the end of November.

We have 6,809 items in our database. Of them, 3,582 have at least one photograph in the database. At the very least we expect a chocolate cake when we reach 7,000 items.

The cataloguing team currently consists of seven people, including Bronwyn, who we are delighted to welcome as database manager. Gary is hard at work on the saddlery and harnesses, and Craig is at work in the post office. Libby and Cheral are in Dr Andrew's (although Cheral is good at being everywhere). Linda is just trying very hard to keep up to them all, and Eddie is preparing to attack the kerosene boxes in the garage.

Life sure is busy. So we were delighted to receive our very own, brand new copy of InMagic/DB Text the other day, thanks to Building Better Regional Museums. We have been operating for the last year or so with a licence on loan from Wellington Shire.

Blogging in the Collections Sector

This post is a little longer than those I usually post here - so grab a cup of coffee, pull up a comfortable seat, and dive in.

I am heading off to Melbourne for a Museums Australia (Victoria) and Collections Australia Network (CAN) Seminar Collections and the Web.

As part of that I will be talking for a short time about this blog, and a couple of others - some mine, some not. So I thought - the easiest way is to put all my notes up here, with links, and then all I have to do is hand out a written link for this post, and everyone has the lot. Easy Peasy.

Blog is short for Web Log - an online diary with, in the fields I am talking about, a high visual content. I have been blogging for almost four years, mainly in the Arts/Crafts area, although I have also had a bit of a diversion to the side into garden blogging.

I have two blogs in the Collections area. There is Old Gippstown Cataloguers (this one), and one I get less time to post on - the Stratford Historical Society blog. The Cataloguers one is primarily designed to let other volunteers at Old Gippstown know what we are up to - this is a large, open air park that is open seven days a week, 362 days a year, and there are many volunteers there we never get to meet. Even those who are there on the day we work (Wednesday), could be anywhere in any of the forty buildings - we don't get a lot of time to let everyone know what we are doing. There is another general Old Gippstown blog where I have even less time to post.

However we also see the blog as a useful tool to have a general natter with anyone engaging in similar work - it can be very lonely out there as a manic cataloguer in a regional area. Increasingly, we are using it to show our work to people who are important to us in the three levels of government. We hand the URL over to anyone who had expressed interest in joining the Cataloguers, as it is a good snapshot of where we have been (and where we started).

But basically, it is just another form of communication, and is there as a worthwhile tool to involve people in the stories we have to tell through the items in the collection.

Blogs suit a chatty, informal format, and are quite easy to get your head around. Where there is a strong blogging community for that sector, a lively online discourse can develop, where people can either choose to be involved, or just sit by and watch a conversation. I come from the high end craft sector, where textiles practitioners often have strong blogging networks with excellent, highly visual blogs. It hasn't quite happened that way in the collections sector, especially in the volunteer-managed collections.

So, how do you start blogging?

Firstly, you need a blog provider. I use

http://www.blogger.com/

Blogs hosted there come up with "blogspot" in the address.

It is free. You sign up and go through the steps of creating a basic blog. You pick up a html code from Flickr for your photos, and paste them into the blog posts. The photo then shows up in your posts.

There are a number of other providers around, but I have found blogspot to be simple enough for me - ask around and you may find someone near you using other online tools.


Then, you need somewhere on the web to load your photos.

I use Flickr. They have a free account that will allow up to 200 photographs, with monthly upload limits for the free accounts. Once you reach 200 the old ones drop off, but they still show up in your blog.

People also on Flickr can choose to be shown your photos whenever you upload, and don't necessarily have to read your blog.

There is also a strong community of people on Flickr, and some interesting groups, such as Sovereign Hill, where people are encouraged to load photographs they have taken there. An extremely useful world-wide list of Museum groups on Flickr can be found HERE.

You can easily form groups for a common collecting interest. I have created a group - Objects in Australian Museums - Help Needed - the idea is that people can load photographs of unknown items and ask for assistance from other members. In the first few days of its life I have solved two objects that had really been bothering me.

Flickr gives you your photographs in a number of sizes, ready to load on your blog:

or

(This one was posted to show a hand-coloured opaltype photograph with a large crack pattern)

You can also link to photos in a larger size, if they are too large to show on the blog. I cannot conceive ever blogging without a lot of illustrations, especially as we are a very object-driven sector. And I generally have them handy on the computer anyway. Ones like this can really catch the eye and sharpen the focus.

(Any excuse to show off a lovely photograph! If you would like to
have a closer look, double click on the photograph.)

And of course, you can easily link to external sites - acknowledging others is an important part of blogging. You don't even have to know much about html or web pages at all.

Then, even before you start blogging, you should read a lot of other people's blogs, to get an idea of what it is all about. Although good, accessible museum blogs in simple language can be hard to find. Joy from CAN has a useful delicious site where she lists sites, including blogs.

The way I read them is by using a blog aggregator, where I just check in once a day and see who has updated their blog. I use:

http://www.bloglines.com/

There is a little bit more tweaking to blogging than that, but I am happy to mentor anyone who e-mails me. So feel free to contact me and I will talk you through it. Or anyone else that is interested.

My email is kapana[at]netspace.net.au

Finally....

If you want a few blogs to look at, to practice subscribing to bloglines, pop over to my sidebar, to the left, and have a look at some that I read.

But in the meantime, here are a few other links:

Mechanics' Institutes of Victoria has been using a free Flickr account with great success to identify a number of photographs in their possession, taken in the 1960s. A more recent move has been to establish a group, Mechanics Institutes, Halls and Libraries, in an attempt to tap into the Flickr community to harvest modern photographs of halls. They have also moved to a blog as one of several means of communicating their message.

So if you would like something to do to practise, go home, photograph your local hall, sign up for Flickr, practice by uploading your hall photograph. Join the group above, and send the photograph off to the pool. Not only does it give you an idea how it works - you will be providing a vital public service for a great mob of people.

Many institutions are now using Flickr to upload photographs. In my area we are starting to investigate uploading there for them to be included in Picture Australia.

State Records NSW is uploading a series of photographs, with 534 so far uploaded.

Australian War Memorial has 36 photographs at the time of writing this post

State Library of NSW has 169 photographs at the time of writing this post

Powerhouse Museum has 1,011 !!! Check out the sets down the righthand side, where they have grouped collections.

There is an interesting Powerhouse blog too, mainly on digital media.


And if anyone knows of any other blogs out there in the sector - please drop me a line - I really would like to hear about them.

How about another nice photograph to finish? Hang on, I'll just pop over to my Flickr pages and pick out something I have posted previously. How about this?

(This was labeled "World War I Dog Tag". It turned out to be a Shire of Avon tag from 1949 to allow a milking cow to run on the common. Chasing down mystery objects is fun).

But it does remind me that I need to do work on consistently adding a scale in photographs (thanks Rob for the reminder). I'm just not sure if I am going to go with the ruler (I keep losing it), or a five cent piece - which I will never see on the horse-drawn hearse. Can anyone tell me what is a common scale object for large items (this is really a trick question to try and get you to comment. Go on, dive in!)

Unidentified Items Identified

It sure has been a busy 48 Hours - with a number of our items being identified as a result of posting them on Flickr at "Objects in Australian Museums - Help needed" (note the slight change of name).

This turned out to be a unit from a "Print-a-Sign", which allowed large shops to print signs, one at a time. You can see the discussion with the photograph HERE. It was identified by the very helpful Melbourne Museum of Printing. Although we were delighted to receive an e-mail from the Sardine Canning Museum in Stavenger in Norway, offering to talk to the printing museum there. So we are asking them if they can help with THIS ONE, which has us (and the MMoP), scratching our heads.

This one turned out to be a hat pin stand - it is obvious once you have it explained to you. Thank you to Ginger for that one. It is what started us thinking in the first place about how to identify unknown items. It was with a lot of kitchen crockery.

And this one? We solved it ourselves. I hadn't previously worked on it, as its cataloguing was carried out by a previous team. As I posted the photograph I realised, under the rust, that there was some form of plate on it.

At one time it was catalogued as a pasta maker, and put with kitchen items. Reading the plate, we found it was a "Home Shaving Machine" by Thomas Edison. Googling around, we discovered it is for recycling gramophone cylinders - although we think it is missing some sort of blade. It is about to have the rust treated, and move out of the kitchen.

But this one (above) still has us totally beaten.

Neerim Post Office

Bob Mills of the Australasian Telephone Collectors Society has kindly been beavering away on identifying the telephones we have in the Neerim Post Office, above.

This is the second Neerim Post Office, operated by Mrs Callow, whose husband was the local wheelwright, and had a workshop out the back.

Before it was moved to Old Gippstown, about 1970, it looked like this:

The collection inside includes a large number of old telephones - such as this one:

Bob writes:

This is a 162AT, as you say, made in Australia by AWA, probably about 1933/34 - you don't see too many earlier than that made here (the design only started in England around 1929). This phone was the first bakelite instrument in common use and spelled the end of wooden phones.

The phone has no bells - there would have been a bell set on the wall somewhere. You will also see this instrument with a bakelite bellset underneath - making a one piece phone called a 232AT (the half inch base on this phone would be removed and then this set screws on top of the bellset).

Thanks Bob!

Bob is also the Society's webmaster. They have a formidable links page if you are researching old telephones.

Unknown Objects

Every small museum in Australia is full of unknown objects. I am off to present at a Forum on Monday 24th about how we can use the internet (especially blogs and Flickr) in the collection management sector. More about that soon - I will actually put my presentation up here when finished, as that is the best way to do links.

But in the meantime, as an experiment, I have formed another Flickr group - Australian Museum Objects - Help Needed. The idea is that images of unknown objects (such as this one above, that continues to puzzle us) can be loaded there, and maybe someone else out in the digital world will know what it is.

More about Telephones

Bob Mills of the Australasian Telephone Collectors Society has kindly looked at our earlier post about telephones, and provided useful comment about our Series 300 Common Battery Table model.

The information for that is on the original post.

This means we now understand much better about the phone above - which is a Magneto telephone of similar vintage. The identifiation series on that is

P.M.G. TE55 338MT 51/60

And again, that probably should end S1/60 - maybe we need a better magnifying glass!

This one still has its original wall plug, but we again suspect that the spiral cord is a later addition. It's easy to understand how people can get addicted to collecting and researching items like this.



GOSH, he is quick. Here is Bob's comment:

The second one is a "magneto" or "local battery" table set (MT=Magneto Table) model 338 (the magneto version of the 332 series). This one was made in 1955 for the PMG by Telephone Electrical Manufacturing Co (England) and is indeed Serial 1, Item 60. Note the bakelite piece at the bottom front - this would allow a pull out drawer for the telephone numbers - an English feature not adopted here in Oz.

Both cords are wrong - should be black cloth covered.

Thanks again Bob - stand by for next Wednesday, when our cataloguer has another batch.

Building Better Regional Museums Grant

We are delighted to announce that we have been awarded a grant from Building Better Regional Museums, that is going to allow us to purchase our own copy of the InMagic software that we are using, and for us to line and shelve our new storeroom. And put appropriate covers on our flourescent lights.

Now, you might think these are strange things to be excited about, but when we are working with a borrowed software licence that has to be returned (many thanks to Wellington Shire), and we have no proper storage to allow us to better care for and rotate exhibits, you would understand why we are very, very happy.

Arts Victoria funds BBRM through its Creating Space and Place program and the Regional Arts Infrastructure Fund, and it is administered by Museums Australia (Victoria).

An added bonus in the process was a visit from the very professional grants manager, Barbara Wels, who provided much in the way of her time and advice on future directions for Old Gippstown.

So we are feeling very fortunate.

Talking about Telephones

We have started to look at the collection of telephones in the Post Office. With the one above, we were able to quite quickly date it from the patent dates on the base - they varied from 1929 through to 1932.

But with this one, it is harder:

All it has on the base is

P.M.G then 300 then CBT [over a line ] 81/91

Now we know that PMG is the Postmaster General. But the rest has got us beat.

And we are wondering - were spiral cords this early?????



LATE ADDITION: Bob Mills of the Australasian Telephone Collectors Society has kindly provided the following details:

"The phone pictured is a 300 series bakelite set made for the PMG probably in England. This style of phone started life at the end of the 1930's but very few were seen until well after the end of the war. CBT stands for Common Battery Table. The 81/91 had me stumped for a while but I am sure it is S1/91 which is the PMG's Serial and Item system - Serial 1 (common for all phones) and Item 91. There appears to be no date - usually there is something like 54 or S54 somewhere on the base or on the handset. May have to open it up to find a date.

The 300 phone had all the workings fixed to the base plate. There is also a 332, outwardly exactly the same but the workings are fixed to the case and the base is just thin metal. During the 50s, the PMG started making a 400 series, mainly here in Oz.

The case on this set is the same as the 300 but the handset is more curved and does not have a spit catcher type mouthpiece. Many of these has curly cords.

Common Battery is the "newer" type of operator connected telephones. The older type (typical of the metal phone at top of the blog) needed to turn the generator handle to summon the operator (This old system was known as either "Magneto" working or "Local Battery" - there would have been a couple of big batteries in a box on the skirting board). The Common Battery system had a common battery in the exchange that supplied everyone and all you did was lift the handset to summon the operator.

You are right - curly cords did not come in until the late 50's. The correct cord is probably a black cloth covered type similar to the one from the phone to the wall (3 wires) but it could be either black rubber coated or even plaitted like the line cord on the metal phone at the top."

Thanks Bob! Much appreciated. We do have a similar Magneto telephone, now we understand that a little better too. I'll post that in the reply at the top of the page.

Mechanics' Institutes

Old Gippstown is fortunate in having two Mechanics' Institutes in its collection of buildings. We have been looking at them a little lately, as one of the team has been working on identifying photographs for Mechanics' Institutes of Victoria - who have their own rather interesting blog.

This is the Narracan Mechanics' Institute from what is now known as Narracan East. We know quite a lot about it, as we have the Institute Library as one of our very special collections.

However the work for MIV has caused us to take a closer look at the former Tynong Mechanics' Institute, which retains its original bio box, which we still use to show films.

Records at Old Gippstown suggested this was a 1920s building, but further research has shown that it is the building that was on site by 1887, and was replaced by the 1920s building that is still at Tynong.

So it is a lot older than we had previously thought.

Garage Signs

Things have been a little quiet at the Cataloguing Office lately, with some holidays being taken. But Eddie has been working away at the Garage, cataloguing the signs. These are a challenge in themselves, as many seem to be the work of a signwriter in the 1970s, to add some form of authenticity or atmosphere to the town. But the decision has still been made to catalogue them, so we have a record. This one is above the door, and is possibly a 1970s sign.

This one is enamel, and definitely original. Now we need a Garage historian to tell us when one petrol firm changed to another.