An Archivist Scribbles

Moving On

2013-02-02T12:22:00.001+11:00

With big changes come new beginnings.

Since the last post, I went from being an Archivist to a Museum Registrar. Now, I'm preparing to travel the world for the next 12 months. I'm like a moth to a flame and will be visiting and thinking about many museums, galleries, libraries, archives and more during my next 12 months.

I will be writing about my travels through collections at a new blog, Museum in a Bottle. Be sure to head on over, check out the map of my journey and subscribe. As always, you can catch me on Twitter too. I would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions about collections to visit, or any you would like to hear about.

For the time being, An Archivist Scribbles is on hiatus. As this site holds the kernels of so many of my current interests and ideas, I'm sure I'll return to reference posts and expand on ideas.

Sydney's Phoenix Collections

2012-05-20T17:06:00.001+10:00

Gibbs, Shallard & Co., Burning of the Garden Palace, Sydney, as seen from Macquarie Street, 1882

Did you know most of Sydney’s major museums once burned to the ground? The Art Gallery of NSW, Powerhouse Museum, Australian Museum, State Records NSW - all are phoenix collections.

It all happened in the Garden Palace. If you know Sydney, you may have heard of it. From 1879 to 1882, the monumental Garden Palace stood in today’s Royal Botanic Garden.

Richards & Co., The Macquarie Street entrance to the Garden Palace, 1880

It cost £192,000 to build (2 million dollars today) and the dome was over 65 meters in height. It was built in only nine months and would be the venue for the mother of all exhibitions - the first of Australia’s International Exhibitions - a huge showcase of the world’s arts, cultures and technologies of the Industrial Age.

Australia couldn’t manufacture enough steel, so the Garden Palace was built of wood and glass then painted a steely grey. It was innovative for its time, using the first electric lighting in Australia to illuminate construction work throughout the night. The first of Sydney’s now-defunct trams were installed to transport the hordes of exhibition visitors along Elizabeth Street to the Exhibition.

After the Exhibition closed in 1880, the building was converted to “Government offices, records storage, galleries and museums”. Many collections were stored there. Then one night in 1882, it all burned to the ground. The blaze could be seen across Sydney and the heat cracked windows in Macquarie Street.

I was led to this moment in history by my nose for destroyed collections. No photographs of the wrecked collections survive, but many of the charred remains of the building do. I doubt any recognisable collection remains were left to be photographed.

Piecing together what was lost is difficult. Like writing a shopping list by staring at your empty cupboards, it’s hard to know the contents of these collections before they were devoured by fire. 19th century museum records were minimalist and these would have been burned as well. Here are the small threads I’ve been able to salvage about what was lost that day:

Art Gallery of New South Wales

The AGNSW collection was held in “nine rooms near the entrance to the Botanic Gardens.” The AGNSW says their move to new premises was because of “concerns for safety and conservation of works, as well as the fire which destroyed the Garden Palace”. No mention of artworks destroyed.

But historian, Shirley Fitzgerald says 300 art canvasses for the Art Society’s annual exhibition were lost in the fire. These works were government owned and administered by the Art Society. After the fire, both the Art Society and Academy of Arts (the administrative origins of the AGNSW) negotiated with the colonial government for a permanent building to be used as an art gallery. We could say the 300 burned Art Society paintings were the beginnings of the AGNSW collection.

Powerhouse Museum

Today’s Powerhouse Museum was born from Sydney’s International Exhibition. The colonial government purchased the star exhibits and founded the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum, appointing 22-year-old Joseph Maiden as its sole curator.

Maiden was devastated by the fire and his letters describe his grief over the lost collection. But he collected as many remnants as he could. The only salvaged object was a carved graphite elephant from Ceylon which “miraculously survived the blaze despite a 5-storey plunge.” Maiden added some large metal remnants from the Garden Palace building to the Powerhouse collection, including a tram wheel with the words “cast through the Garden Palace fire” inscribed on it.

State Records NSW

Authorities suspected arson to be the cause of the fire and the media believed the destruction of the 1881 Census was a motive. This eliminated key evidence of convict backgrounds in established Australian families.

In the words of Peter Orlovich, Archival Historian, this fire was likely “the most serious event which caused loss and destruction of our historical records in the history of archives in New South Wales.” Many records of the colonial Government were destroyed, including survey plans of pastoral stations in NSW. The loss of so many State Records is still felt by genealogists and historians today, but none more so than the 1881 NSW Census. All of the census forms were housed in the Garden Palace when it burst into flames. None of the census results had been printed and only some tabulated summaries survived.

Australian Museum

Both the technological and ethnographic collections of the Australian Museum were held in the Garden Palace. The ethnographic collections were loaned for the International Exhibition and the technological collection was to become today’s Powerhouse Museum. Over 2,000 ethnographic objects were lost. But by 1883, the Australian Museum had acquired more than that number again and these were soon displayed in specially built ethnographic exhibition halls.

As recently as 1999, some Australian Museum objects were identified as survivors of the Garden Palace fire. A group of ‘man’ arrows were found to be acquired well before the Garden Palace was built. They would have been stored at the Garden Palace as part of the ethnographic collection. With no other ‘man’ arrows acquired by the Museum, these objects are certain to have passed through the flames of 1882.

Some less well-known Sydney Museums were nearly wiped out too. Around 50,000 specimens in the now-defunct Mining and Geological Museum were lost (although an early earthquake machine survived). The gold in this collection was another suspected reason for the arson – to hide its theft. The Linnean Society stored its library, equipment and specimens across two rooms of the Palace and lost them all.

A Positive Note

The Linnean Society’s first President, William Macleay, donated his natural history collections to the University of Sydney in the years after the fire. The University constructed a fire-proof building to house them, a lesson learned from the Garden Palace tragedy. Today we know this as The Macleay Museum.

This post may seem like a litany of lost and destroyed collections. The fate of the Garden Palace was a pivotal moment in Sydney’s history, unifying its landmark museums. It was also the most destructive moment for the city’s Museums and its impact is still felt today. But all collections survived and burgeoned in the following decades. Thanks to the efforts of staff – curators, registrars and archivists - who worked to rescue the remnants, start again and keep collecting for future generations.

Garden Palace Memorial Gates, Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain, Sydney

5 Tips for the Best Exhibition Visit

2012-03-24T13:21:00.001+11:00

The new Director of the Art Gallery NSW, Michael Brand, confessed this week to walking out of blockbuster exhibitions because of crowding. If the new doyen of Australian art institutions can’t handle a blockbuster, what hope do the rest of us have at surviving these experiences?

Record breaking crowds flocked this summer to the Art Gallery NSW for Picasso and to the Powerhouse Museum for Harry Potter. Museums are not about collections anymore, they’re about using collections to bring in visitors. Museums are about you.

We know a visit to a blockbuster isn’t about great art or objects. It’s about the ache in your feet and the huge man blundering into you to get a better view. It’s about survival in mile-long queues, keeping your brain intact in artificial light, too-cold air conditioning and protecting your bank account against the ever-calling gift shop.

Even Michael Brand knows there’s no point in persisting with the crowds if you can’t meaningfully engage with the objects, read the texts or understand the curator’s rationale. So what’s the best strategy to see a ‘once in a lifetime’ blockbuster exhibition and come away in one piece?

Alfred Janes, The Queue, 1938

1. Go it alone

Navigate the crowds in the gallery independently. Going to an exhibition with a group of friends or family is great – they are another pair of eyes and set of opinions to bounce off. They’ll help you see details you would otherwise miss.

But you’re already juggling yourself in the crowd. It’s so much harder when you bunch together in a group. Take the stress off yourself and everyone else by navigating the ocean on your own and cross paths with your comrades intermittently.

2. Get the inside goss

Save yourself a headache by planning ahead. Call the museum first. Find out when the quietest times are, if pre-purchased tickets are essential and the easiest way to buy them.

Extended opening hours and pre-purchased tickets are common for blockbusters as museums try to reduce the dreaded ‘gallery rage’. I watched fellow visitors arrive without tickets only to be turned away at venues all over summer and realised many don’t know about extended hours. These are the quietest periods, often with an absence of queues.

3. Get sneaky

Pay equal attention to the people around you and the objects on display. Don’t bulldoze others. Don’t take a stool and expect others to stand aside. None of this means you have to sacrifice a good view.

If you’re aware of your surroundings, you’ll find sneaky gaps between people or vantage points over shoulders. Indicate to others you’re happy to share space by standing to the side of objects. Others will follow. Take the time to be aware of others and you’ll reap the benefits.

4. Get ahead

Do an initial walk-through. Viewing objects like pages in a book is not mandatory nor is it the best approach. The walk-through lets you get ahead of the crowds and read the overall narrative. You need to move through the first room quickly and walk the length of the exhibition.

You’ll find out how big the exhibition is, how long you should sustain your energy and where the objects you want to see are located. You might even get your favourite objects or whole rooms to yourself. You’ll understand what the curator wants you to see and be prepared to form your own conclusions when you go back for a detailed look.

5. Get off your feet

I used to think gallery seats were for the weak. Hardcore exhibition visitors didn’t use seats. I was wrong.

You get museum feet for a reason. Humans aren’t designed for standing still for long periods. The constant information intake, artificial light and regulated atmosphere will give you ‘museum brain’ too, the feeling of mental exhaustion and cotton wool in your skull.

Use the seats. Use the time to take in the spectacle of the blockbuster experience. Massive crowds at a spectacle have been happening since medieval pilgrimages, so appreciate the cultural experience you’re taking part in.

Great Collectors: Caspar Friedrich Neickel

2012-03-10T14:45:00.001+11:00

I naively declared I would read Caspar Friedrich Neickel’s Museographia a while ago. Turns out, it was written in German and only recently translated into Italian. Despite it being Museum Studies 101, you can’t read it in English.

With this book, Neickel was a founder of modern day collection management. It has one copper-plate etching – an illustration of the collection room and its arrangement. For English speakers, this is the key to Museographia’s contents. Classifying the world was fundamental to collection management in Neickel’s time and remains so today.

Neickel or Einckel, Jenckel or Jencquel (confuses the heck out of Google) was passionate about collections and kept one himself. He researched 128 other publications to write Museographia, had it edited by Dr Johann Kanold and published it in 1727 under the pseudonym ‘C F Neikelius’.

So what’s Museographia about? Most of the 464-page volume is an alphabetical catalogue of ‘cabinets’ (or private collections) and libraries throughout the world. Neickel hadn’t visited all these collections so relied on accounts in books or from travellers. Like his second-hand account of collections, English speakers now have to rely on second-hand accounts of Museographia.

It’s Neickel’s introduction that’s famous. It outlines:

how a collection should be stored and displayed
the organisation of a library
the origins of collections
differences between collection types
a definition of the term ‘museum’
25 rules for museum visitors

In other words, it’s the first Museum Studies text book ever written. It’s the first time the word ‘museology’ was used and the first time the word ‘museum’ was defined.

Museographia appeared when man was classifying the world. Only a few years later, Carl Linneaus established ‘genus’ and ‘species’ in his work, which influenced Darwin’s theories of evolution. Man classified the world and the museum was his prototype.

Neickel’s prototype museum had a specific arrangement:

First wall for natural objects (human anatomy above; quadrupeds, fishes, minerals beneath)
Second wall for man-made objects (ancient and modern productions separated)
Third wall for cabinets of coins
Above the shelves for portraits of famous men
The roof for stuffed animals

By separating natural and man-made objects, Neickel even created the art collection.

Neickel’s book was for owners of private collections (as all collections were 1727). They should be stored in one room painted in a light colour, with fresh air circulating and all space used. Even in the earliest days, museum storage was at a premium, atmospheric control important and design relevant.

Museographia is one of the first museology books. It shows the relationship between man’s quest to apply logic to the world and the role of collection management today. I just hope one day, someone can translate it into English.

*Check out my Zotero library if you’re looking for more info (in English!) on Neickel’s Museographia.

Review: Picasso at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

2012-03-03T11:18:00.001+11:00

This one’s simple. Picasso at the Art Gallery of NSW is a brilliant exhibition. You should go.

It’s Picasso in the White Cube - the iconic artist and gallery space of the modern era brought together. The galleries have been stripped back and all elements – design, interpretation and objects – come together in harmony. It sings

It's Picasso thanks to Edmund Capon too, the retiring Director of the Art Gallery after 33 years. Its his coup to have this portion of the Musee National Picasso in Paris brought to Sydney, alongside simultaneous exhibitions of the collection around the world.

Design

The exhibition fills most of the ground floor of the building, covering a huge span of history and array of artwork across 10 rooms filled with drawings, prints, sculpture and paintings. It's strictly chronological, letting you wander the length of the artist’s life – beginning with a work created at 12 years old and ending in the year of Picasso's death.

All traditional gallery tools have been removed and the works hung on bare walls. In the first room, only the words of a quote adorns a wall. The colour of each room gradually darkens as the decades ebb towards World War II, descending into a deep grey. You’re then released into the positive outlook of the post-war years with suddenly-white walls and a life-sized bronze goat.

Interpretation

There is a bare minimum of interpretation. A photocopied booklet is offered at the entrance and brief paragraphs appear in the doorway of each room. All other social and historical context has been neuted by the white cube - no audio guides, no guided tours. Even labels have been pulled to the edges of walls, causing confusion in matching titles to works. So I let even these basic details go.

The one source of scholarly information is your Apple device, an object as paired back in design as the galleries themselves. Visitors, including children, waft through plugged into the podcast, which focuses on single works from each room. It’s a feature I’m exploring long after leaving the gallery.

Objects

Be prepared to grapple with the Picasso ego. He understood branding before the term was coined. He depicts himself in the striped shirt from early in his career and you’re presented with the striped shirt in the gift shop.

From the start, you can see the young Picasso’s natural talent in all mediums, his ability to depict the human form. He proved his mastery of the rules and foundations of representational art then spent the rest of his life throwing them out the window.

In the later years, you’ll see Warhol’s pop portraits emerge from Picasso’s work like a mirage, in the hyper coloured portraits and famous images painted again and again (like Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe). Until his death, Picasso was ahead of his time.

With the exhibition nearly empty between 5 and 7pm on a Saturday, I felt serene as I floated back into the Domain afterwards. Here, you can take all the time you want to look at Picasso and nothing else. No distractions. You’ll emerge to see the world a little differently.

Review: Harry Potter at the Powerhouse Museum

2012-02-25T14:45:00.004+11:00

I’ll come clean. I had no intention of seeing Harry Potter: the Exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. At 11am on opening day, I was enjoying a quiet weekend breakfast in a cafe, suburbs away. But 3 little girls were next to me, happily waving wands and clutching Harry Potter gift shop boxes. They’d already finished their blockbuster museum experience.

I was a little old for the Harry Potter series when the books were released. So I felt like a Muggle in the exhibition queue, squeezed between a little girl decked out as Voldemort and some 20-something’s losing their shit.

I had all sorts of questions:

The Powerhouse is making big profits from this bought-in blockbuster; did it offer HP fans a quality museum experience in return?
Would the HP exhibition offer a worthwhile experience for adults as well as children?
Museums educate us about the real world - its past, present and future – so how does an exhibition about a fictional story fit?

Before HP opened, the Museum’s Director, Dawn Casey explained it "suited the Powerhouse’s renewed focus around human creativity, innovation and trades. People want to know how things are made." In other words, a glimpse into set, prop and costume design would engage both kids and parents, and add a new aspect to the HP world.

But the exhibition has been touring for a few years now. Others have reviewed it and revealed it doesn’t include behind-the-scenes elements, with one blogger concluding there’s "too much -tainment and not enough edu-". So what does it offer visitors, if not new information? It offers an experience:

The HP blockbuster ticks all the boxes of an immersive experience:

1. Select entry – visitors have to buy pre-booked tickets and queue for at least 30 minutes. To throw yourself into hoards of kiddies and crowds, you have to be dedicated.

2. A threshold – staff wind up the crowd before entry, everyone chants spells en-masse before some are sorted by the Sorting Hat. Its 45 minutes from joining the queue before your let lose to explore. By this time, you’re pumped.

3. A narrative – usually a curator and designer create an exhibition narrative. But here, it’s the narrative that determines everything - visitors wanted to get inside the HP story.

4. A sensory experience – this is like an exhibition held at Hogwarts. The visual incarnation of the HP world is complete, with music and sound effects creating a mood in every room.

5. A finite experience - the exhibition has a huge floor space, but it doesn't feel like it. Before you know it, you find yourself in the shop. Staff at the exit emphasise you can't go back.

If you’re hankering to throw yourself into the HP world (as many visitors are), you’ll have no trouble at this exhibition. But I watched many groups move through quickly, few read the text panels and there was a sense we hadn’t learned new aspects about the HP world. We all looked forward to the interactivity in the shop; there was rampant wand swirling, house t-shirts and magic lollies galore.

This exhibition deserves kudos for driving hoards of all ages to the museum. But do yourself and the Powerhouse a favour. There’s 3 weeks left to buy a general admission ticket. While you wait for your HP session, stretch your mind and enjoy the other exhibits at the Powerhouse. Then turn your brain off and revel in the HP world. Who knows, you may come out having learned something and wearing a Hufflepuff House Shirt.

Why Do We Love Ephemera?

2012-02-20T13:40:00.006+11:00

"I collect nothing - with a passion. That is to say, I collect hardly anything that is collectible, not a thing anyone else would wish to collect, but at the end of the day, having myself wanted all these unwanted things, having procured them and organised them - filed, boxed, arranged, and fussed over them - I have a collection."

Collections of Nothing, William Davies King

People think I'm obsessed with rubbish. There are others like me - I’ve previously written about the Master Collector of Ephemera, John de Monins Johnson, here. But I don’t agree with those who think we’re obsessed.

Most of us can't see how ephemera can be valuable, let alone worth collecting. It’s understandable with the rubbish in our lives, overflowing from landfill and letterboxes. Overwhelming rubbish is a hallmark of our times. Richard Stone manages the ephemera collection at the National Library of Australia and he knows we all think its rubbish. He talks about "the spectre of benign neglect that haunts ephemera."

We all think it’s rubbish, but we love it. Here, I’ll prove it:

In the exhibition marking the 100th birthday of the State Library of NSW, curators thought a collection of all the junk mail received by one household in 2007 was valuable and interesting enough to include in the display. Visitors loved it.

In the permanent exhibition at the National Library of Australia, the most significant item is the earliest Australian printed item, a theatre flyer. Its ephemera and visitors love it - they buy reproduction postcards of it in the shop.

We think ephemera is rubbish but it can be the most valuable item in a collection.

Ephemera is complex on many levels. How do you collect it, knowing so much of it ends up in the bin? All you can hope for is a sample, and a small one at that.

Then when you collect it, it's impossible to organise. You can’t waste time registering individual bottle tops, business cards and bus tickets. How do you create a system that usefully organises all the ephemera you collect? You can't.

This rubs librarians, registrars and archivists up the wrong way. We're into control, order and systems. Even Richard Stone describes ephemera as "a threat, an element of chaos in the otherwise organised system."

Ephemera relentlessly argues against the phenomenon of the collection and the act of collecting or managing one. It challenges the human instinct to collect. It asks us, what’s the difference between collecting and hoarding? What is the boundary between the collectable and the trash? Are our personal and publically owned collections rubbish? Is our rubbish collectable? Why collect something that isn’t worth anything?

All those who ask me why I collect rubbish are the voices of the ephemera itself, asking me the same thing. Asking and arguing, insisting it won’t be systematised, organised, controlled. Insisting it has no value.

So why do I love ephemera? Because I love a challenge and I love to scrutinise what collections are. Ephemera insists you wrestle with its arguments, the fundamental challenges it puts up against the profession of collections and do so every day. If you’re going to manage an ephemera collection, you can’t do it half-heartedly.

A New Place for Collection Goodness

2012-02-11T19:53:00.005+11:00

A generous designer friend has helped me tart up An Archivist Scribbles. After too many changes of outfit, I’m ready to step out and get on with the task of writing better posts.

I’ve also created a Facebook page for all the other great articles, news reports, YouTube clips and collection related thoughts and tidbits I find along my way. Clearing that clutter should leave An Archivist Scribbles to showcase the meatier posts. In effect, An Archivist Scribbles and its Facebook page have different content – you should sign up for both.

If your not on Facebook, don't worry, you can still see all the content and follow all the links.

Review: Handwritten at the National Library of Australia

2012-02-04T15:20:00.009+11:00

An exhibition of documents and books is tough to pull off. You’d be surprised at how little real and constructive published discussion there is on this topic, because frankly it’s a damn difficult task when trying to engage an exhibit visitor. As the great Jim Traue said, “to exhibit them in a gallery as if they were specimens, artefacts, or works of art, is a denial of their basic function”. They’re simply not designed to be put on exhibition – their message is hidden between the covers, they’re not visually striking or made to be looked at by more than one person at a time.

But I don’t think this is a reason to give up before you get started (although some have been known to deny it’s even possible!). Quite the contrary, you have to work harder to think outside the box, find new ways to get creative and draw in visitors. The rewards promise to be so much greater, with new and original exhibition concepts created and curated.

So, knowing that it was such a tough task, I predicted to my fellow library go-ers over Christmas that Handwritten wouldn’t break any new or original ground in how it displayed its documents, volumes and manuscripts. From the promotional advertising, I knew the incredible array of authors whose letters were on display - Michelangelo, Napoleon, Galileo, Bach (and the list goes on…). I predicted that this exhibition would rely on the pulling power of these names and that sense of awe and wonder they inspire to bring in the visitors. But I was so wrong.

I was struck dumb by the first room. It displayed volumes of manuscripts - they appeared as a flying flock of open volumes, moving in formation through a dark night sky. On their own separate black plinths, each volume had a golden glow from the gentle, conservation-friendly lighting. And to finish off the effect, a blue diagram of an astral body was projected across the black walls. I found the design of this room as captivating as the items displayed.

The exhibition was structured in 3 main rooms or parts. The first contained the flying manuscripts, the second (and by far the largest) was a long continuous white wall of closely packed window boxes, each containing a letter by a historically famous author along with a small amount of interpretation. These windows were in chronological order, leading the visitor through time and history. A third room displayed original musical scores, with embedded speakers over some display cases, providing the visitor with the essential aural and visual experience of the music.

The continuous wall of letters was deeply engaging yet, at the same time, the most difficult aspect from a visitor’s perspective. There was simply so much there. Perhaps there was too many items? Perhapes just too much text overall? Perhaps the gallery was too small? Perhaps there were too many visitors in the gallery? If the queue shuffling from window to window wasn’t at a complete standstill and unable to move forward, I was being mowed down by a gargantuan older man behind me who never seemed to fully comprehend my existence. By the time I got three quarters of the way through I was mentally exhausted and had to pick the eyes out of the remaining letters on display. Luckily, the large and high-up window headers let me do this easily.

Despite the difficulties in viewing the letters, I came away feeling stunned by the amazing documents I’d just seen. I had new insights into known historical figures or learnt about entirely new people or parts of history. I had been amply rewarded for my mental exhaustion.

The music room was a relief and came part-way through the wall of letters. You could linger as long as you liked over each and take them in in any order. I'm not musically minded so it was fascinating to watch my sister pick out the score by Bach from across the room and be physically magnetised to it. How’s that for pulling power? There was more sharing between visitors here, as some explained aspects of the written music to others who weren’t familiar. Despite the dull mess of musical noise which leaked across the rest of the exhibition, the speakers worked well. The music was crystal clear if you stood directly underneath the relevant speaker.

Moving beyond the physical exhibition itself, one of my favourite features was a blog about all sorts of behind-the-scenes aspects which the curatorial team at the NLA continue to add to. They’ve been generous in responding to comments and sharing information that often isn’t easily accessible (never in the catalogue) but is so valuable for anyone interested in exhibition design or museum studies. It’s certainly something I’ve appreciated about the exhibition and keep going back to - and it's where the images in this post come from.

Overall, I think the curatorial and design teams behind Handwritten struck a balance between creative exhibition design to help visitors recognise the historical resonance of some items, and a reliance upon the obvious pulling power that other items hold. Visitors would have to view the exhibition with their eyes shut to miss the incredible development of human thought, creativity and history displayed here. Or not to recognise the role that the simple act of handwriting on paper has played within the development of these facets of human existence.

Collections in War

2012-01-27T15:35:00.009+11:00

The most under-rated aspect of Sydney is its inadequate army of taxi drivers. A majority of them have something compellingly interesting to say. It’s not always something you’ll agree with; keeping the conversation on convivial terms is often an exercise in diplomacy or just simply keeping your trap shut. But if you have this skill, you will learn about the changing face of suburbs and communities of Sydney in a way you never imagined. Other times, you’ll see a window into another part of the world, from a perspective that our evening news will never provide.

One such example happened to me recently. My taxi driver was born in Lebanon, grew up in Palestine before getting married 20 years ago in Darlington, Sydney. He remains very aware of the extremely complicated political and power struggles in the Middle East. His account of the recent political turmoils in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria as well as Iraq, Albania, Lebanon and Israel was compelling and resembled nothing of the paired-down, one-sided, simplistic reports I read on ABC Online or the BBC. And the seed that started his revelatory litany was museum collections.

My taxi driver was quite well versed about which national museum collections in the Middle East have recently been ripped apart as a result of war, as well as who has been accused of physically wrecking them. I heard an account of a US tank in Iraq going through the front doors of its National Museum. Knowing that the plunder of historic collections have been going on for all of time, my taxi driver emphatically declared that it is those who hold power allow some collections to exist and others to disappear, who create history and who allow some to live to tell their tales and others to be killed and their stories silenced. For him, the destruction of collections by an act of man is always and only another chapter in the power struggle that is history. For him, history is nothing more and nothing less than a symptom of power struggles between nations, communities, religions and governments.

I’ve been very cautious about discussing collections which have been destroyed by war on this blog. It’s a topic on which I am no specialist and there are others who are better positioned to speak. I don’t have the understanding or the knowledge about the incredibly complex politics in what seems to be, from my own peripheral perspective, far flung places of the world. Nor do I have the ability to unravel what is true and what is false, whether official US Government statements are reflective of reality or other parties are at play, seeking to create friction through falsities.

So, on this occasion, I will let my taxi driver speak for me.

What I can do is leave you with images depicting the damaged archive collection of the Institute of Egypt. The Institute was “founded by Napoleon during his expedition to Egypt in 1798, and the current building was built in the early 20th century. It held approximately 200,000 books, some of them rare and irreplaceable.” The building was set alight in the week before Christmas amidst fighting on the streets of Cairo, during which many were killed.

The following footage is nothing short of incredible. It depicts protesters in Cairo carrying burned books and documents from the still burning Institute of Egypt:

A Collection becomes a Self-portrait

2012-01-15T18:32:00.029+11:00

Location: Sydney, Australia

Occupation: Archivist

I lived in Canberra, Australia during the January 2003 bush fires. I was fighting off falling ash on the family home before the wind changed and sent the 10-metre wall of flames into different suburbs, destroying different lives. The car was packed, and I’ve always had my list in my mind since.

Everything else can go, but these items would stop my heart from breaking:

Handbag and passport– all the everyday essentials

Childhood toy – this toy was made for my first birthday. It’s as old as me.

Jewellery box – an antique heirloom containing more irreplaceable heirlooms inside, handed down through the family for some generations.

Family history – 6 years of genealogical research into mine and my partner’s families, 8 generations on all sides.

Hard-drive – all writing, family history and photos.

Print – Wititj Python, by Phillip Gudthaygudthay, printed by Theo Tremblay. My pride and joy.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-15T18:22:00.008+11:00

With a New Year, this blog is becoming a whole lot more relaxed. A less demanding posting schedule and a less streamlined scope of topics. This blog has always had an alternative agenda which will, from now on, adorn its sleeves – to be a journal for myself, a place for all my thoughts and interests in the hope that one day a PhD topic may arise from the mess.

It’s now also going to reflect a new pathway in my career, hopefully one that is much more focused on exhibitions of all types. So expect to see some exhibition reviews, a bit of fictional writing (thank you waiting for the hammer), some discovered historical figures or objects, but as always - a lot more about collections of course.

So here’s to new outlooks and new beginnings.

During my hiatus, I became inspired by another blog The Burning House, which seems to be targeting designer and fashion-y types. But aren’t they all these days? Nonetheless, it’s a good blog - chock-a-block full of self-portraits in the shape of personalised collections of stuff. I thought I'd jump in too and make my own.

Great Collectors: John Johnson

2011-09-25T16:33:00.018+10:00

John de Monins Johnson, 1882 - 1956

Slowly but surely, I’m gathering collectors. I don’t mean current day people who read this blog. I mean those incredible collectors of the past, whether they’re well known or not, who saw the world as a big potential collection. People who lived for their collections and left incredible legacies. Predecessors, heroes, if you will.

My first love from the world of collectors, is the English collector John Johnson. He was born in 1882 and died in 1956. He was very nerdy in today’s terms; the stereotypical inhabitant of a library.

Johnson started out as a papyrologist, studying the archives and manuscripts of ancient civilisations during summer and managing archeological excavations in Egypt during winter. About this combination of early careers, he said:

“I was spending my winters with large gangs of fellahin digging the rubbish-mounds of Graeco-Roman cities in Egypt for the written materials – the waste paper – of those ages… Often I used to look over those dark and crumbling sites and wonder what could be done to treat the background of our own English civilization with the same minute care with which we scholars were treating the ancient.”

Johnson pondered over history, its nature and used these thoughts to reflect upon his present and its future. From hunting for and studying ancient texts, he became fascinated with those largely neglected texts in his own era.

He went on to become Printer to the University of Oxford in 1925, a role he held throughout WWII until his retirement in 1946. His greatest achievement in this role was what is now known as the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, which is currently in the collection of the even more incredible Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

I believe that Johnson was the most successful collector of ephemera that ever lived. Being the Printer of one of the world’s most respected universities, he was in a prime position to collect ephemera – hot off the press, literally. And he didn't just collect for the sake of it - he really thought about the nature of collections as a phenomenon, and their significance.

I’ll leave Johnson to explain his collection through a selection of his own words:

“I set to work, timidly at first, but soon with more confidence, on what appeared to be the miscellany of the world, to show what was really the order and development of it… all the ephemera of our lives, were brought into the compass of illustration.”

“Collections came into being, photographic and of scraps…”

“It is difficult to describe it except by saying that it is everything which would ordinarily go into the waste paper basket after use, everything printed which is not actually a book. Another way of describing it is to say that we gather everything which a museum or library would not ordinarily accept if it were offered as a gift; so that these University collections fill a gap in the world which nothing else really fills… I think I can say that the width of these collections as they stand, has no other counterpart in the world. Collected on this wide area, they render us open to the banter of the world... I challenge any … to suggest any subject in which we can record no evidence at all!”

“[There are those who see] the truth that waste, the ephemera, of today are the evidential data of tomorrow, call them collectors or whatever you like.”

“I hope that the future may be tempted to add out of the unconscious selection of the present, just as we in the present have added out of the unconscious selection of the past.”

Johnson imagined a space in which his fantastical ephemera collection was kept, arranged and accessed. He called it the Sanctuary of Printing:

The Sanctuary of Printing

In the catalogue, it’s said that “on its transfer [to the Bodleian Library], the Collection consisted of over two and a half thousand folio filing boxes, many containing hundreds of items, several hundred large folders, several cabinets of drawers, and many hundreds of volumes.” Or 1.5 million items, apparently.

It also been said “there is little doubt that Johnson was among the great collectors.” But it seems there’s very little current interest in John Johnson, the man or his collection over-all. Beyond the catalogue of his collection published by the Bodleian in the 1970s, and the multitude of finding aids created with sponsorship, I can’t find discussion about him or his views on collecting. Nor can I find discussion about the significance of his collection. Is it too big to be properly understood or used, can we not see the forest for the trees? Or is the problem in the difficult nature of ephemera - it just doesn't fit easily into categories?

Dismantling the Curator

2011-09-22T12:00:00.029+10:00

Agatha Gothe-Snape, Wrong Solo I, 2010

It’s ironic that in a post titled Curating Destruction I mentioned a debate about the proliferation of the word ‘curator’. See Rebecca Goldman’s blog for a good overview of the online tit-for-tat.

This misuse gets me all like a cat with its hair brushed backwards. But I will avoid getting on my high horse, partly to keep this post to a vaguely reasonable length. Instead, I’ve discovered something that the blogosphere debate appears to have missed.

We all know the Curator used to be the specialist, the Scholar, ‘the public intellectual’. It was thought that Curators gave their knowledge like Pez dispensers and visitors, like the blank slate they are, unquestioningly and happily received it.

But we also know that visitors are pretty savvy, intelligent and come with their own perspectives and contexts. We are critical visitors, casting a knowing eye and, while learning about new subjects, we want to know whose speaking, why they’ve said that and not something else. We want to know what they’re trying to tell us, but we also want to know why they’re teaching us that. Why have they displayed it all this way, to make it look a certain way, and not a different way all together? And hang on, we can do a better job ourselves… if you just give us access to the information…

So, within the profession, the term ‘curator’ was side-lined for a few years. The term itself became a little bit destroyed. I was recently stunned to find out that when the National Museum of Australia opened in 2001, not one of its staff positions were titled as curator. The peak national museum did not have a curator. Jennifer Barrett says the term was ‘abolished’. Today, the word is used everywhere without thought and with complete abandon and only 10 years ago museums were banning the term. This all seems a bit bizarre right?

Apparently, the Curator is a concept that’s back in vogue and now they’re allowed to be the respected scholar again, so long as they tell us where they’re coming from and maintain a bit of transparency in the way they weave their magic.

And this is where I think the current proliferation of the word ‘curator’ comes in. While Curators have been allowed back onto the pedestal, no one else is getting off. Democracy has come to the museum, and amongst a cacophony of voices and perspectives, everyone’s going to be a curator dammit. And so I jump on board too, because everyone deserves to be a specialist!

But then the head of the Australian Society of Archivists starts talking about curators of data and my hairs bristle all over again…

History in the Mud

2011-09-15T12:00:00.040+10:00

I’ve had a major find in the hunt for images of collections destroyed. I discovered the great flood of the Arno River in Florence, Italy on 4 November 1966. Like those Art History buffs before me, I'm wondering how on earth I hadn't heard about this event before now.

This is an event which is still commemorated in years marking significant anniversaries of the flood. It killed at least 30 people. And the area of Florence most heavily impacted by the 1966 flood contained many world renowned collections, including the National Central Library (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze), the Museo Galileo (formerly the Institute and Museum of the History of Science or the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza) and the Basilica of Santa Croce, which contained Cimabue's Crucifixion.

There are so many photographs of Florence that day, and of course, they all look incredible, because it’s Florence. Even if it's covered in mud and horror, the world will love Florence. But being the twisted Archivist I am, I was blown away by a mountain of images of priceless collections coated in mud, thrown up in piles against walls or being carefully air-dried.

I first came across this event and its affect on some of the most valuable collections in Italy from a catalogue of the Museo Galileo. It includes images of the inimitable Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli, then Director of the Museum, looking stylish while ankle deep in mud, holding priceless collection objects. I hadn't just discovered the flood, I found a woman (a woman!) after my own heart - one who lived for her collection. She died the year before my birth, and it was noted in her obituary that, on the night of the 1966 flood, "single-handedly she rescued most of the important treasures of her museum in a night time flight across the rooftops of Florence".

These images indicate the violent strength of the water that day, which threw any number of items in the Museo Galileo collection up against the walls of the lower story. You can see how high the mud rose in some of these images:

After the flood of water, the city was then flooded with volunteers who came from all over the world to help restore Florence and its priceless collections. Some were professional conservators, others were inexperienced students. Together, they literally shoveled mud, books and documents into the backs of trucks and set up book and paper hospitals to restore them. These people, whoever they were, became known as Angeli del Fango, or Mud Angels.

One of these Angels was actually Christopher Clarkson, a member of a small English book repair team who spent their time focusing on damaged items in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. It was after this event that Clarkson coined the term 'book conservation' and went on to become the conservator at two of the worlds most incredible paper collections, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He described the flood and his work as a Mud Angel in 2003.

Some of the most stunning images of the floods effect were taken at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, which apparently had one third of its holdings damaged, equating to 1,300,000 items - a simply mind-blowing figure. It explains why a lot of the material has not yet made it back onto the shelves today.

Cimabue's Crucifixion, and the damage it received from the floods, now seems to symbolise the impact of 4 November 1966, and the efforts to revive the city. Whilst the Arno has flooded before, it seems that 4 November 1966 was the largest since 1557, since the middle of the Renaissance. There was much in Florence in 1966 which had not experienced the lapping of the Arno before.

The most stunning image I found is this one below, for which I haven't yet been able to find a detailed caption. However, I would put money on it being of the State Archives of Florence. It had me jumping out of my chair and yelping. It’s so utterly stunning, and is the gem of my gathered 'damaged collection' images so far:

*Please note that I don't usually include images with watermarks. But all those of the Florence flood are very closely guarded and these were the best I could find.

Collections are my Religion

2011-09-11T11:00:00.011+10:00

Suzzallo Library, University of Washington, Seattle (USA)

Phew! Writing academic essays, even if they are about exhibitions and collections, doesn’t leave you with much steam left for blogging. But! I soldier on like the believer I am.

I was recently reminded of a curious thing I noticed online - that Reading Rooms always look like chapels, churches or cathedrals. Just do a Google Image search, and you’ll see what I mean.

Thanks goes to Dr Chiara O’Rielly, who pointed out that the origins of exhibitions go back to the Middle Ages, when religious relics were taken out of their repositories and paraded around communities to allow worship and reverence. Similarly, food stalls and musicians paraded pilgrimage routes to make the journey part of the religious experience, just as the same kinds of entertainment and sustenance turns some of today’s blockbuster exhibition queue’s into a festival atmosphere, making the wait part of the exhibition-going experience.

The authority of the priest and religion gave way to the authority of the curator and the collection as the specialist and repository of knowledge. And so, the reverence practiced in churches and cathedrals gave way to the worship practiced in today’s Reading Rooms - hushed tones, heads bowed along the rows of tables under awe-inspiring architecture and stained glass windows.

New York Public Library (USA)

Then you have your domed cathedral Reading Rooms:

Bates Reading Room, Boston Public Library, Boston (USA)

Library of Congress, Main Reading Room, Washington DC (USA)

Reading Room of the British Museum, London (UK)

And your little chapel Reading Room:

Chetham's Library Reading Room, Manchester (UK)

And a total merging of Religion and Reason:

Reading Room of the Vatican Library, Rome (Italy)

I’m sure this is all a hang-over from the relationship between the Enlightenment and Religion. From the revolution of the printing press distributing knowledge and learning to the masses, so that Libraries and Archives become the hotbed for developing society, not the Church. So that reference collections, like massive encyclopedias, come into existence, challenging with Reason the authority of the Church.

It’s such a curious and beautiful full-circle that the Enlightenment’s antagonism against Religion seems to have turned Reading Rooms into a religious experience.

From the Trees, Feeding the Trees

2011-09-08T12:00:00.012+10:00

I’ve been finding some amazing images of collections suffering some kind of destruction lately. My most recent find (I’m saving the best until later) are these images of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, otherwise known as the Roosevelt Warehouse. Not technically a collection, although it was a site at which library and text books were collected and stored prior to being distributed to schools in the area. (It also held a lot of stationary and equipment – all the stuff that schools need – but I’m overlooking that part here, for good reason…)

The story behind these photographs is told by a photographer, James Griffioen. He says that in 1987, a massive fire broke out in the depository. The blaze and the water from fire-fighters hoses mostly destroyed the building and its contents. But instead of demolishing it or salvaging what they could, the Detroit Public Schools Department left it all to rot, and eventually sold it onto a somewhat powerful property tycoon in the area. I believe the building remains in largely the same state today, 33 years later, although it was boarded up in last few years to (unsuccessfully) prevent people living there.

The reason I’m overlooking the fact that this isn’t technically a collection (although who can tell the difference after 33 years of rot and fire and water damage) is that Griffioen taps into something of the feelings I have about damage to collections. As I read his words about a destroyed and rotting school storage repository, I realised I was reading the feelings I get when I see images of really damaged collections:

“Here we get to see what the world will look like when we're gone. We see that the world will indeed go on, and there is a certain beauty to nature's indifference. Someday the books will tumble from the shelves at the Bodleian and there will be no one to replace them... It is the book lover, I think, who is most pained by these images. Even as we sit here at our computers, we pine for the feeling of pressed pulp between our fingers. We have a hard time accepting that all our words and knowledge might one day feed the trees.”

Collections of Yore

2011-09-01T12:04:00.049+10:00

The Cabinet of Curiosities: the Metallotheca of Michele Mercati in the Vatican, 1719

Now that I’ve successfully transferred to Sydney Uni (an experience which is not for the feint hearted), I’ve started swatting for my next stint in Museum Studies. I’ve been ploughing my way through a fantastic but seriously full-on chapter of a book by Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex" in The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995). I wouldn’t - not for a second - suggest that anyone goes out and reads this book voluntarily; it really doesn’t get more academic and heavy-going. Some sentences I found barely comprehensible.

Having said that, I really enjoyed reading it! I won’t profess to know anything about Foucault or Gramski (how do I spell that?) but Bennett’s tracing of the role of collections from an elitist, private phenomenon into a public institution to educate, civilise and control the masses is bloody interesting.

I’m going to stop apologising for appearing to only pay heed to the pictures in books or articles I apparently read – it’s obvious by now that they’re all that stay with me. Bennett’s article was full of images of old collections, a major weakness of mine. They all seemed to illustrate Bennett's statement that,

...while earlier collections (whether of scientific objects, curiosities, or works of art) had gone under a variety of names (museums, studioli, cabinets of curieux, Wunderhammern, Kunstkammern) and fulfilled a variety of functions… they had mostly shared two principles: that of private ownership and that of restricted access.

Maybe I could start a collection of alternative words for collections?! I’m adding studioli, Wunderhammern and Kunstkammern first.

The cabinet of curiosities: Ferrante Imperator's museum in Naples, 1599

In my search for decent versions of those above, I stumbled across some other amazing images that could also have appeared in Bennett’s article. Like this one of Levinus Vincent's collection in Amsterdam, which was auctioned off after his death in 1727. Now that's something to break your heart...

Or this image which appeared in Casper Friedrich Neickel's Museographia in 1727, an "aid in classification, care of a collection, and the identification of potential sources from which collections might be developed". I think I'll be reading a version of that as soon as I can...

I found so many incredible images of 'collections of yore', I couldn't post them all here - I could have filled a book.

All of this reminded me of a fantastic image I once stumbled across, The Artist in His Museum, painted in 1822 by an American artist Charles Willson Peale. I’d been waiting to post this image here for ages, but only now do I understand it. It’s actually a self-portrait. Apparently, Peale founded the Philadelphia Museum and was its curator (if there was such a thing then) from 1784, in addition to being a painter.

The perspective in the background extends so far and is so vast, it can’t be accurate or realistic. Apparently, “the museum's receding shelves display animal species organized by Linnaean classification, and above them are portraits of revolutionary heroes and other notable Americans, whose placement suggests the position of humans in the great chain of being” (thanks, Wikipedia). And of course, its only by Peale’s invitation, him drawing back the curtain, that your allowed in to gain the knowledge contained in the collection’s contents. How very upper-class!

Let the Collection Speak!

2011-08-25T12:00:00.023+10:00

From time to time, I feel exasperated by an historian, a media person or curator who approaches me for collection items which fit into a story they're trying to tell. And it drives me nuts. It's important to listen carefully to a collection, to let it tell the stories it holds, and not force or squeeze something out of it. More often than not, the desired item to tell a conjured-up story doesn't exist and the requester goes away frustrated.

But this week, I went along to the Recordkeeping Roundtable’s latest event, Hacking Archives, and I found myself in the company of people who really know how to listen to a collection. With a formidable line-up of speakers, my head was left full of amazing ideas about the ways that collection catalogues of all types can be leveraged in the online world. It was truly inspiring and the rampant potential made me itchy to get out there and explore these happenings and their capacities. Is a data related qualification next for me? I might not be good with numbers, but I’m great with collections and eeking out their strengths, and this is where the strength of metadata is too.

As the speakers imparted their wisdom, I began thinking about collections and their management in a slightly new light. In the shadow of every physical collection is its data. They are twin collections, the physical items and the metadata, that can never be separated without each losing their meaning and significance, without each being good only for the trash heap.

But it’s the use of these shadow collections, the metadata, in linked open formats to build new finding aids and interfaces which reveal things in age-old collections which we never knew.

Over the last 40 years or so, data and collections have come together in something which resembles a slow-motion head-on collision in the online world. And now, out of the deafening chaos of information overload, are coming numerous creations of beauty, including my new favourite toy, Zotero, as well as other, far more creative projects, like those explored over at Discontents, or “what took them so long?!” projects like those at Opening the Catalogue, the NSW State Records Open Data Project. If you come across other projects using linked open data to leverage collection catalogues, give me a-hoy in the comments. I'd love to get a mini-collection of links going.

These new finding aids and collection interfaces are allowing patterns and trends to appear across a collection, en masse. We’ve never before been able to manage collection metadata in a way that enables us to look at it all, to see vast tracts of records together in a particular light. In this way, collections are being given a voice to tell stories we never knew they had in them.

And, in another giant leap, it’s not reliant on the staff who manage collections to create these tools. The big wide web is allowing the users of collections to grab and harvest the information in collection catalogues and create new masterpieces and reveal new interactive insights. Collections are no longer a prisoner to the abilities of their managing staff, or of government funding nightmares. They’ve been given a new voice and some wings to go along with it.

History in Your Clothes

2011-08-21T12:00:00.024+10:00

I recently read Ruth Park’s Playing Beattie Bow for the first time in probably 20 years. I ploughed through it in 2 days, with very late nights not being able to sleep until I got to Chapter… until my eyes involuntarily closed. It’s as good as when I first read it as a kid.

I’d lost this book for years… not physically, but somewhere along the way I forgot its title and the author, as well as key parts of the plot. But the main character, Abigail, never left me, or the ability to imagine history and see its reflection in my present. Whenever my parents took me to The Rocks during rare visits to Sydney, Abigail would appear on the cobblestones and the stairs; I could feel 1873 just around the corner like a smell in the wind. I realise now that I always wanted to go back into history too. And now, as an Archivist, I try to do just that everyday.

I’ve had new insights from reading Beattie Bow that I just couldn’t have picked up as a kid. Ruth Park really knew her history and historical artefacts – it was no flippant gimmick that she made a piece of handmade fabric, a piece of clothing, the key to Abigail’s time travel.

I realised in my time at the Powerhouse Museum that old clothes have an undeniable similarity to paper documents or photographs. Just as it seems like you’ve only briefly missed the author of that letter signing it in his own hand, and you can almost see the figure in that photograph turn around, you sense that the person who wore that dress or skirt or coat has only just left the room. You can see the little catches in the thread, the pulled or missing buttons, the ink or paint drip on the sleeve. You can see where the garment was strained by the presence of their body. The sense of a person is completely held in a piece of their clothing, just as it is in their handwritten signature on a document. Bringing a collection of these items together, you feel so close that you wonder where the beating heart is.

So I feel like I’m looking at the shadows of people who have just excused themselves when looking at items in the Australian Dress Register. This is the ultimate archive of significant garments in Australian collections and it was only launched this week. See the latest article added, a handmade shawl which traveled out from Scotland in the early 1800s and has been handed down, along with its story and that of the family’s history, through the female line for nigh on 2 centuries. This garment is the real life version of the handmade cloth which the plot of Playing Beattie Bow turns upon.

Working so close to such personal and historical items in my job, I’m constantly chased by a sense of sadness. I’ve only just realised that this feeling is nostalgia and I think it’s a peculiarly adult emotion. It’s this sense of sadness that the end of Ruth Park’s novel almost drowns in, as Abigail finds out what happened to the Bow and Tallisker family of 1873 but is unable to fully understand their experiences. It’s the feeling of threads pulling your heart in opposite directions, forwards by the hope that artefacts in front of you will open the doorway into history and backwards by the adult knowledge that you must remain in the present. It’s only a child’s sense of imagination, a belief that it is possible to step through a doorway, that saves them from feeling nostalgia.

A Collection Gone Sci-fi

2011-08-14T21:05:00.006+10:00

Yesterday, in finding one, small, lost little collection, I heard about another, big, techno-fied one - the amazing new storage facility and library building at Macquarie University. This is a collection which has become an android – it’s been given a robotic limb! This is a collection with a sci-fi biography.

At a cost of $97 million, Macquarie University has built a state of the art Library building, of which the publicly accessible part has only increased in size by 3 square meters. However, only 20 per cent of the collection is now available to be physically browsed by students. Underground is the other 80 per cent - manned by a new automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS). Books are stacked into ‘pods’ which are mechanically put back into place or retrieved by a robotic arm. It’s not too hard to see that it was adapted from mechanized warehouse storage systems. The footage of this system in action is phenomenal; it’s great to see something that feels so futuristic at work within a library now. All I could say was wow!

The opening of the new library on 1 August of this year was marked by a ‘human chain’, with a book passed from the old building to the new from person to person. This book was then placed into a pod and the mechanical arm did the rest… This footage is 95% human chain, 5% showing the new repository at work. A good symbol of the amount of human labor required to maintain physical retrieval systems, but makes for largely boring viewing:

Here’s some better footage of the system in action at J. Paul Leonard Library at San Francisco State Library:

Using this technology, Macquarie University found a way to provide the space needed for students to actually study on campus, whilst maintaining and providing access to their huge collection. Books are retrieved by the repository within 3 minutes of a student requesting them – and they predict the new facility will cater to Macquarie's storage needs for the next 50 years!

All this is mind-blowing when compared to the 24 hours taken to request stored books at the ANU or the large disposal program being implemented at the University of Sydney and the UNSW to solve their storage difficulties. Although these things can always be solved with money… if you have it.

Anti-gravity History

2011-08-11T12:00:00.005+10:00

I’ve been reading A. A. Gill’s latest book, the insipidly named Here & There: collected travel writing (2011). Despite the title, and even though each piece has been lifted from Gill’s regular column in Australian Gourmet Traveler magazine, the book is fantastic. Really, Gill is a brilliant writer and his insights about the world have me reading out whole pages to my partner everyday.

One of his pieces particularly hit me; titled “Flight of Fancy”, Gill liberates history.

“The past should be a moveable picnic. You can use it to brighten up a dull town or a tedious suburb. Why shouldn’t the Battle of Lepanto have taken place in your municipal boating lake? And Marco Polo would’ve stopped at your out-of-town shopping centre if he’d had the time. Attaching the past to specific lumps of geography is very narrow-minded and pedantic. The past happens in books, films and photographs and in your head. You can take them where you fancy…

History and geography and the factual past are a relatively recent invention. Before there was biological and topographical Africa, there was a continent of ghosts and ancestors, of myths and fables. The bushmen will still tell you, with a certainty that will cold-cock a polygraph, that the moon is one of mister praying mantis’s swollen testicles.

Before history, we had the myths of gods and heroes. We still move around the classic world saying, this is where Odysseus slept, this is where Hercules had a bit of a barney. The other world hides under the certainty of maps.”

Trust a travel writer, he who traverses the geography of the ‘here and there and now’, to have an unconventional take on navigating time and history, the ‘been and gone’.

Gill takes those tenets of history – time and geography – that combination which confounded me in high school history class – and just throws them away. You’d think this would help me out a bit, make them easier for me to navigate in their absence. But actually, I’m all discombobulated again.

It makes me feel like the historical gravity has disappeared and I don’t know which way is up or down. That symbol of local Sydney history, the water in Sydney Harbour, lifts out and particles fly everywhere, swarming around me. As if it’s no longer bound by gravity, the whole ‘under your feet and in the ground’ bit no longer seems relevant. In all this subsequent chaos, there is no longer any reflection, any meaning to leak into the present. All of a sudden, it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore, or that there’s any point to thinking about history.

For some I suppose it could be liberating - the real possibilities for fictional story telling would come of this historical anti-gravity.

But it makes me feel like I’ve lost my bearings completely, like I have no compass or mode of navigation anymore. Like the roads have gone and it's purely down to me to decide the destination and what on earth that might look like. And so I realize that I’m not your standard writer of fiction. I don’t think that’s for me. It requires far more agency than I have to apply – I’m someone who needs some of the road rules of conventional history at least.

Perhaps I had my elements wrong and Elise Polito had it right. She and A. A. Gill see history as the ultimate gravity-defying element - and that’s not water - it’s light.

The Lives of Collections

2011-08-07T13:10:00.006+10:00

Okay, I'm back on track and promise not to indulge in random-ness repeatedly.

Today, I’m picking up a thread that I touched on in my post, Is There Anyone Out There? This is when I mentioned that collections are more than the sum of their parts – they have lives of their own, biographies to be told.

Well, I think that biographies of collections are more interesting than the average human's.

I was recently given a book about my favorite collection, Treasures of the State Library of New South Wales: the Australiana Collections, by Anne Robertson (1988). Like all other books about famous collections, this is largely a catalogue of gems held in the State Library, briefly prefaced with an abridged history of the collection.

There are an abundant number of books about specific collections – and always the story of the collection, its history, is told as a preface to a catalogue of treasures. It is individual objects that get visitors into collecting institutions - it’s like they can’t see the beauty of the forest for the distraction of the trees. But not me. I hoover my way through the initial chapters about a collection’s history, its story, and fizzle out when it gets to the glossy pictures of objects.

I’m always struck by how many human elements there are in a collection’s biography – they can be orphans or have only 1 parent (older collections only seem to have fathers – like David Scott Mitchell and the Mitchell Library), most have various caring guardians, they move house and sometimes (more commonly these days) they live in share houses (like parts of the National Archives of Australia). They can be seriously injured in disasters (like the Education, Fine Art and Architecture Library at the University of Western Australia) and or are pulled apart by war (the Iraq National Museum). It all seems very human and lifelike to me.

Sometimes they have parts of themselves removed or disposed of (like the Fisher Library at Sydney University) or are given new parts and new limbs (like the Bodleian Library at Oxford University gaining the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera). Sometimes they are underestimated or forgotten or even lost (like the Vignacourt photographs of Australian WWI soldiers), other times they are powerful and revered (Library of Congress). Some of them are small but are cared for by dynamic people and are able to punch above their weight (Sydney Town Hall), other times they are huge, obese and those who care for them struggle to use them dynamically (National Gallery of Australia).

Sometimes they are poorly managed, and these collections seem to not know themselves and are vulnerable and insecure (NSW Jazz Archive). Others are managed so well, with such care and detail, and these collections are esteemed, confident, know their place and are respected (the Powerhouse Museum).

It’s these human characteristics and personality traits which fascinate me about collections. They are related to, and influenced by, the management structures around them - the ‘institution’ around them. But they are also somehow independent of this too – their unique, personifying qualities are always a bit organic. This is something I love about collections and I wonder if anyone else sees these features? Let me know if you think of any other biographical traits to any collections you know.

The people who manage collections are always interesting, but it’s my awareness of this bigger, organic phenomenon, a bigger personality, which influences my love of working with collections. Their lives seem to be so much bigger than our own.

An Archivist Indulges

2011-08-04T12:00:00.046+10:00

Recently, I experienced one of those euphoriously glorious days which Sydney has from time to time. They’re those unexpected perfect weather days, not too hot, not too cold, with the sun beaming radiantly. They usually come after extended cold or cloud or rain. The kookaburras were laughing, the bees were feeding from the nasturtiums, the jasmine was displaying thoughts of flowering and the students were lazing around. It's days like these that, I swear, more people meet and fall in love in this city than on any other day. It's days like these that I fall in love with this city again (living in Sydney is a love hate relationship in itself, I find). And on this day, I was lucky enough to have the day off and could soak it all in. I also realised that the walk from Sydney University to my house is one of the best around and I find myself with my beloved iPhone out, every time I take this little journey, snapping away at every piece of eye-catching urbanity I see.

So to celebrate a day such as this, and having finally succeeded in getting a Sydney University student card after about 4 months of administrative hoop jumping, not even old men accosting me about wasting film in my iPhone on graffiti (?!) brought me down. Here are some of the fruits of my day:

My snaps are a good segue to another blog I found recently, called Pavement Graffiti : Stories from the Ground Level Gallery. It’s another local lady writing about another type of scribbling, outside of the archives, but still using them to think about history and place and community. Check it out – it’s well worth a look-see!

Madonna & the Grand Old Dame

2011-07-21T12:00:00.023+10:00

One of my favorite places in Sydney is the Town Hall. It’s one of the most under-estimated public structures in the city, long forgotten behind the overstated glamor of the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge. But, being built on the oldest white-man cemetery in the country, imbued with the earliest attempt at an Australian aesthetic of native flora and fauna, and constructed amongst numerous political shit-fights, the Sydney Town Hall is founded in historical significance.

At its heart is the Grand Organ, the largest in the southern hemisphere when installed in 1890. After an initial heyday, the organ slipped into serious disrepair, and had major trouble with backfiring and smoke issuing from mechanical bellows during performances, as well as pipes being souvenired and others completely clogged with dirt. In the last few years, it has been entirely restored and the Grand Old Dame once again looks and sounds incredible.

So, it was an odd moment of the present cacophonously crashing into history when Lady Gaga flooded the Town Hall with her entourage, costumes, smoke machines and super-base speakers in the last week. The sound from her audio system roared through the building and deep into the earth around it, down among the remaining graves of our first settlers. I wondered what on earth they thought of the intrusion?

I have to hand it to Gaga though, who didn’t just play her role and ignore her set. This amazing photo shows her, the young, shocking Madonna of our time playing the Grand Organ during her gig. I think it's the ultimate way to bring the Old Dame back into a new hey-day.