Join us in #collectionfishing on Twitter

The Collections Australia Network has been collectionfishing on Twitter. Each day a different organisation organically comes up with a theme for the day. Participants fossick around online collections for related material. Synesthesia took hold of the cultural sector online last week with the days of the week taking on different colours. Te Papa, New Zealand, started the week off with blue, Museum Victoria saw Tuesday as blue / red and Wednesday as red, CAN nominated Thursday as green and Friday yellow.

CAN is using #collectionfishing as a form of collection research, as its starting point for sourcing psychiatric hospital collections that could be uploaded to the CAN collection database.

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Highlights
Monday / Blue: @staterecordsnsw licence for the Coolamon Golf Club (Blue Light Disco)
Tuesday / Blue:@museumvictoria Oh the nostalgia, a lovely Bondi Blue iMac
Wednesday / Red: @CAN001 Old Gippstown on CAN A slightly different drum with red and blue
Thursday / Green: @CAN001 from the UTAS Fine Art Collection on CAN, thanks to Rachel Rose, Spit Bay, Heard Island
Friday / Yellow: @TePapaColOnline What will make you iron faster? Yellow racing stripes Iron, His Masters Voice, circa 1955

@MigrationMuseum, South Australia, took photographs within its exhibition space of a collection of items from the Polonia Soccer Club and uploaded it to Twitpic. Very resourceful – proof that anyone can play this game and participants are not confined to those with collections online. @lifeasdaddy, aka Bob Meade, is a well-known citizen researcher of cultural collections. He has been yelling out cries of encouragement from the sideline but we would love him to search across the nation’s collections on CAN and tweet them.

To participate, search a cultural collection online with the theme of the day in mind. Briefly describe the item, add a tinyurl to take the reader directly to the artefact (shorten the web link at the website www.tinyurl.com) and finish the tweet with #collectionfishing. Remember, CAN is looking for any reference to mental illness or psychiatric hospital collections.

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Tips+Tricks: Creating and keeping digital treasures

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The State Library of Western Australia (SLWA) has just published an excellent resource on how to create and keep digital treasures. It is a very comprehensive 19 page pdf that can be downloaded from the SLWA website. It covers extremely important issues like creating several copies of digital files and storing them in different locations, ensuring preservation copies can be read using open source software, keeping file formats current, periodically checking access to digital files and creating a metadata system.

Download here

World’s Columbian Exposition: Ferris Wheel, Chicago, United States, 1893. Flickr Commons / Brooklyn Museum Archives

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Two perspectives on putting collections online

The Collections Australia Network (CAN) takes two approaches to putting collections online. Exporting the entire database into an Excel spreadsheet with images or selecting a minimum of five items to be uploaded. Here are two case studies demonstrating both strategies.

RACHAEL ROSE University of Tasmania Art Collection online
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University of Tasmania Fine Art Collection registrar and keeper Rachael Rose has successfully uploaded the entire art collection to CAN. Even though she only has general computer skills, she was able to export the whole collection into an Excel spreadsheet without any difficulty. Rachael approached CAN for a little Outreach support. Now researchers and curators can search the whole university art collection online. Email Rachael Rose if you would like to know more about her experience of preparing the university art collection for CAN.

DAVID HARDHAM Glen Eira Historical Society collection online
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David Hardham is an IT professional who volunteers for several historical societies in country Victoria. He has been working with the Glen Eira Historical Society in Victoria to raise the profile of the organisation. His first step was to put the collection online in phases so that the society could assess the impact of going online. One of its greatest concerns was the impact on photo sales but the society was reassured that there would be more likely to be a positive impact on this revenue stream. Email David Hardham if you would like to know more about his experience of preparing the Glen Eira collection for CAN.

How did the organisation upload its collection to CAN?
DH: We selected a sample collection to upload rather than our entire database. We did this to see what the impact would be and the effort required to do this as we have approximately 2000 items that is increasing every week.
RR: Exported 1270 records in the database onto an Excel spreadsheet, then matched images, copied them and sent through on a separate disc.

Does CAN’s metadata suit the organisation’s catalogue fields?
DH: Generally yes.
RR: Yes.

What was the impact on resources in preparing the collection to be uploaded?
DH: The time taken in extracting the information from our existing database and re-formatting to the required metadata structure. Now that we know how to do that, we can tailor our database extract to the same order and fields as the metadata and that will make further extracts a lot easier.
RR: Time- although most of the information was in the database, I discovered that over the years and with different people entering data there were discrepancies, typos, and missing details which all needed to be corrected and then checked. It was a fantastic opportunity to get the database into shape, but took a lot longer than I first anticipated. Also matching up images which could be copied across took some time, as many had to be rescanned or photographed. Until this point the database has only been viewed by the curator managing the collection, and so many of the images were only snapshots for identification purposes. To get better quality images for online use meant a little more time and work, but it was well worth the effort.

What was the biggest challenge in preparing the collection spreadsheet?
DH: CAN can only hold one record per item, we have a number of single entry items that have one or more photographs, so we have to replicate the spreadsheet line so that there is only one photograph per line. An example is that we have a single entry that has over 200 photographs associated with it.
RR: Checking all the information was correct against other records – with so many entries it was fairly time-consuming but it also meant I learnt a lot more about each individual artwork in the collection.

What will be your approach moving forward?
DH: Using the answers from the two questions above as a guide, we will probably upload our data in stages rather then an entire database at once.
RR: Learning how to use social media.

What will be the potential benefits in having the collection on CAN?
DH: Provide access of our collection to a wider audience, especially the photographs we have.
RR: People often enquire about what works we have in the Collection, so it will be helpful having an online presence to refer them to. I hope it will bring the Collection to a wider audience for general appreciation and also to aid researchers and other artists.

To what extent will social media be used to share stories about collection material?
DH: It is an evolving story that will expand as more data is catalogued and recorded and made available. We see it as a key item in making the general public aware of what we have and what we do.
RR: This is not something we use now but certainly an interesting possibility in the future.

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Pioneer Wendy Hucker celebrating domestic life

Wendy Hucker has carved a place in Australia’s cultural heritage to celebrate ordinary women’s domestic objects. When she moved to Tumburumba, near the Snowy Mountains, in the 1980s she was appalled to see women discarding their old aprons and wash tubs, preferring to have everything new. Mrs Hucker started the movement to celebrate domesticity through the setting up of the Pioneer Women’s Hut, National Quilt Register and several consultancy projects, including with the National Museum of Australia. From her home in Goulburn, she talks about the influences on her life and her involvement in preserving and celebrating domestic objects.

Listen to interview


Edited transcript
I became really interested in ordinary women’s domestic life and the more you looked at it, the more you saw that the written history was about important women or women who made a contribution during the war. Often they were rich, but not always. But it was never their ordinary life that was even touched upon.

Domestic objects historian Wendy Hucker
Domestic objects historian Wendy Hucker

I think the interest came when I moved to the Tumbarumba district and I went to the tip. The tip was actually at Rosewood and I was so appalled at what families were throwing out like an old sugar bag apron and rough mended quilts and kitchen utensils made from tins that I went away and thought about it a lot. It was almost as though they were saying that these things were not worth saving and you could go down the main street of Tumbarumba and buy a really nice patterned apron in a sort of Liberty print very cheaply. So a lot of stuff was being discarded and when I spoke with local women they confirmed this, ‘new is best’. So after lots of discussion a group of us realised that ordinary rural domestic life was a neglected area of history. This was probably about 1983 or ‘84 and the Pioneer Women’s Hut emerged from this period.

Domestic objects, photography by Sarah Rhodes

The Powerhouse has certainly led the way in highlighting domestic life and they had for one wonderful short period a domestic history section. Out of that came a seminal exhibition called … never done …, that really had a huge influence. I think that city women’s things somehow were often kept, maybe, more than the country women’s. In the country there were many domestic and farm processes that needed to be recorded while they still existed or were at least in living memory. Many of these were pre electricity like sewing with a treadle machine, making butter by hand, cooking on a fuel stove and hadn’t existed in the city for a long time. Wash day was another one, because until not so very long ago, women improvised with coppers and did the washing outside. Sometimes the pegs were even handmade. That thing of washing just didn’t apply in the city, or not at that period, anyway. You had the tyranny of distance in the country, and that led to in the early days, of course, horse drawn vehicles. So there were whole areas that didn’t apply in the city.


At the Pioneer Women’s Hut we were always interested in informal ways of tapping into women’s history, though that’s just a grand term for women’s lives. As time went on we promoted a policy we called our NON acquisition policy as we realised how important it was for families to retain their own things and hand them on in the family and regard a museum as a second best option. Even if the things were just milk jug covers or hand made toys or copper sticks. These represented their personal past not that grand thing of ‘the’ past.

So in line with our non-acquisition policy we decided we would ask women to record details of their quilts. We only selected quilts as they were something that was fairly universal and covered a wide range that were hand made. The National Quilt Register is the result. So it’s a way of women sharing information but retaining their own heritage and I think it has been fairly successful. This way is more common now of course of sharing information but not putting an object in a museum and the National Dress Register is another example. A bonus is that the cost of looking after any sort of object, even the most simple domestic one is now getting huge. By the time we make sure it is very simply conserved and it’s catalogued and it’s stored its all become really expensive and it is much better for families to care for their own things and hand them on in the family.

(I also worked on) ‘The Material Culture of Backyards’ , a consultancy for the National Museum. So I was looking at the role of backyards within a family and gender issues such as who used the space most and for what. This included things like why men cooked the barbecue and never cooked anything else, which is very true. I think women like it that way. Despite the ever popular men’s shed I found backyards were much more women’s and children’s space despite being traditionally regarded as the men’s domain.

When I was a child, my parents had one of the radio licenses, commercial licenses, in New South Wales. It was about 1932 and the Depression was on and they had both been school teachers in Narrandera and gave it up to start a radio station. They couldn’t afford to employ anyone so everything on air in those first years was by my Mother or my Father or later on I helped too. So when it was decided to start a children’s session and I was about 5 by then, I couldn’t go on air because I couldn’t read without stumbling occasionally and my Father was absolutely pedantic. He had been a school teacher and there was no way I was to go on air until I could read properly.

As soon as I could read fluently I was an essential part of the children’s session and I used to read Enid Blyton’s ‘Sunny Stories’ of which I still have some. I was also trying to teach our dog, we had 3 Fox Terriers and Gay was one, to bark on command on air but she wasn’t so good at that.

And we used to send birthday presents out. That was a big part of the children’s session. So it would be little Jamie’s birthday and you’d say ‘Jamie, if you look behind the lounge, you might find something there’ and Jamie would look behind the lounge and there would be the present. So all that was good fun.

I think that early period stood me in good stead for a lot of things, one of which was seeing my Mother combine domestic life and an exacting job without making any real distinctions. The radio station was on air from early morning until about 10 pm Monday to Sunday so her two roles had to be juggled in terms of priorities at the time. Most of my long working life I have followed that and not made clear divisions between work and leisure.

Interestingly, in those early days of radio there was no soundproofing of studios so when I was on air I loved opening the window so you could hear the swans on the lagoon. It was quite a different way of looking at radio. It wasn’t that sort of ‘no background noise at all costs’ but rather that radio was a part of people’s lives then much more than it is now and everyday sounds were part of that. Anyway, it was also good fun.

To learn more about the importance of ordinary domestic objects, email Wendy Hucker.

Music with thanks to Miriam Venus for The Flight with a Goddess.

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Tips+Tricks: Video for the Web

The CAN Outreach Blog has compiled a simple guide on how to make video for the web. The main source of material has come from Shooting Web Video: How to put your readers at the scene. CAN highly recommends readers download Mindy McAdams’s Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency. This is a bible for those wanting to participate in any type of social media, from producing video for the web to blogging.

A possum and a movie camera 1943, Australian War Memorial

A possum and a movie camera 1943, Flickr Commons/Australian War Memorial



Guide to making video for the web
1. Refine the story into one sentence to focus the idea. This will reduce any temptation to shoot everything.

2. Basic tools: digital video camera, a microphone, a tripod, a computer with enough processing power to capture and edit video, video editing software.

3. Interview: Make sure subjects are relaxed first. Ask simple questions that require a sentence to answer. Ask questions that evoke feelings, emotions and opinions. Don’t say anything while the subject is talking and don’t be afraid of silences. Ask the interviewee to pause between thoughts or mistakes so that is easy to edit.

4. Video images: Fill the frame. Keep the composition simple and uncluttered. Do not shoot into window light. Shoot sequences of video – a wide shot, medium and close up, with cutaway shots from multiple locations. A good trick is to ask the subject the same set of questions from two different angles (close-up and medium). Hold each shot for a minimum of 10 seconds. Avoid pans and zooms.

5. Write the script once the footage has been logged and captured in the editing software. Lay the best soundbites first and then build the images and secondary quotes around them. Poynter’s guide to script writing is an excellent and succinct resource.

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Powerhouse Museum Object Name Thesaurus live: Susan Davidson

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The Powerhouse Museum has recently put its Object Name Thesaurus onto its website. So it is now finally available for everyone to easily access and use. We hope it can be as valuable a tool for other collecting institutions to use in the management of their collection information, as it is for us here at the Powerhouse.

The Powerhouse first developed this thesaurus back in the early 1990s to standardise the terminology used to describe its own collection. With a collection of around 400,000 objects we saw the need for an effective way to organise information in our database to make searching for objects easy and precise. The Thesaurus was first published in 1995 as the Powerhouse Museum Collection Thesaurus, but has been out of print for many years. We are finally able to provide this updated PDF version of the thesaurus in its alphabetical format via our website.

The purpose of the Powerhouse Museum Object Name Thesaurus is to provide object name terms within an Australian context, for indexing museum collections. It also provides a controlled vocabulary that facilitates easier searching of collection databases for specific object types.

One of the strengths of the thesaurus is its Australian focus. While it does include terminology from around the world, it specifically includes object name terms in common use in Australia. The Powerhouse Museum Object Name Thesaurus is the only thesaurus for object names that recognises Australian usage and spelling.

There are currently about 8,600 terms in the thesaurus that name or categorise object types. It can aid searching for objects across your collection database by ensuring that the same term is used consistently to describe similar objects. It formally organises relationships between terms in a hierarchical structure so that the relationships are explicit.

Another advantage of using a thesaurus is that it can assist in the general understanding of a subject area. A thesaurus can provide a ‘semantic map’ by showing the inter-relationship between objects and help to provide definitions of terms. This is particularly true for the Powerhouse Museum Object Name Thesaurus which can provide a greater understanding of an object and the relationships between different types of objects.

The Object Name Thesaurus is an intrinsic part of the Powerhouse collection database. The thesaurus is maintained within our collection database and so is a ‘living document’ constantly being updated with new terms added and old terms reorganised as we continue in the perpetual task of documenting our collection.

Recently we entered into an agreement with the National Museum of Australia (NMA) to provide an electronic version of the thesaurus, which they now use within their EMu database. This has benefited the thesaurus by the addition of a number of terms to match objects in the NMA collection. It is possible for any institution to obtain an electronic, text-based version of the thesaurus which also provides the hierarchical structure of the thesaurus. To discuss possibilities for your institution to use the Powerhouse thesaurus, or if you would just like more information about the thesaurus, please contact me via email: Susan Davidson.

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Where is the Indigenous cultural material around Australia?: AIATSIS

As the Collections Australia Network (CAN) has travelled around the country offering outreach support, it has found many small organisations are the custodians of Indigenous cultural material. The caretakers are not always sure whether the photographs or objects are culturally sensitive so they have decided not to exhibit them or put them on CAN. This is a respectful approach but there is something else that can be done to make sure the material is safe.

Di Hosking and David Jeffery, AIATSIS
AIATSIS Director of Audiovisual Archives Di Hosking and Collection Unit Manager David Jeffery

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) is developing a national database that identifies where material is around the country for research and preservation. This will help identify the artefacts in need of care and items of national significance. Silverfish could be eating the possum skin cloak wrapped in a blanket under someone’s bed or original photographs could be pinned to a noticeboard in the sun. Both items are being damaged and are irreplacible. AIATSIS is asking all organisations to contact the peak body to let them know what material they have in their collection. AIATSIS can offer resources to help organisations establish what material they have, determine access rights and strategies on how to care for the material. If the item needs care that the organisation is not able to provide, alternative arrangements can be made to loan or donate works to AIATSIS or the National Museum of Australia (NMA). Please email David Jeffrey to start a conversation.

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AIATSIS offers a free workshop and manual on how to store, document and record called Keeping History Alive. Group bookings are available and it runs from one to five days depending on the needs. They also offer outreach support when travel costs are paid. Please email Access Unit Manager Tasha Lamb for more information on this course.

Sarah Rhodes

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‘Object of the Week’ blog at the Powerhouse Museum: Melanie Pitkin

Beavering away behind-the-scenes of any museum are collections focused staff (curators, registrars and conservators) working on lively projects, exhibitions, object acquisitions and research papers. Much of this work is only ever experienced by audiences as an end product, as a display in the museum; a publication or event. In light of this and the fact that museums’ only ever have 3-5% of their collection on public display at any one time, the Powerhouse Museum has turned to collections blogging as a way of improving access, dialogue and transparency in museum practice.

Approaching our one year anniversary, the blog was initially setup by Erika Dicker (science and industry guru extraordinaire!) in March, 2009, before I joined her as co-manager a few months later. We post three times a week on all aspects of the Museum’s collection (organised by theme) including architecture, fashion, space, transport, decorative arts, health and medicine and design, along with some other quirky and insightful categories like the mystery object, meet the curator and boring looking objects that tell amazing stories! We’ve also recently started a thread with guest bloggers and curators. In other words, anything goes!

Earoscope, metal/wood, [USA], 1893, © Powerhouse Museum all rights reserved
Earoscope, 1893, USA, Powerhouse Museum, © all rights reserved

But, not only do we seek to expose our collections; it is also an opportunity for us to discover and share in the personal stories and associations our readers have had with these, and similar, objects. By blogging on our collections, we’ve already identified previously unidentified curiosities (the Earoscope), established more detailed ownership histories (the Dior suit) and fired up heated discussions (the Centenary of Powered Flight debate) thanks to the comments we receive from readers! ‘Object of the Week’ is a rich soup of objects, history, nostalgia, eccentricities and ideas.

Email Design & Society Curator Melanie Pitkin or Erika Dicker for any more information about setting up a blog.

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Female factories: Taking freedom from the past

Bonney Djuric sees parallels in the lives of convict women and the recent experiences of wards of the state. The Parramatta Female Factory Precinct housed orphans, convict women, girls at risk and those in need of psychiatric care. As a former Parragirl, Ms Djuric is campaigning for the precinct to be preserved, with hopes to regenerate the neglected buildings into a cultural centre. She is looking to the project manager of the Cascades Female Factory Historic Site Shirley McCarron for guidance and inspiration. Mrs McCarron is responsible for transforming the derelict piece of land in Hobart, Tasmania into a National Heritage Site and has recently submitted an application for World Heritage status.

This video explores the lives of wards of the state and convict women through the eyes of two inspiring women Mrs McCarron and Ms Djuric.



Email Bonney Djuric if you are able to support her dream of making the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct a heritage centre. Please email Tanya Gadiel MP for a copy of the petition to sign for the protection and preservation of the precinct.

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Plundering and poaching: Tasmania’s whaling history

Hobart was the biggest whaling port in the southern hemisphere in the 1800s but now is the launch pad for anti-whaling vessels, like the Sea Shepherd and Ady Gill. Maritime Museum of Tasmania curator Rona Hollingsworth worked with the Collections Australia Network (CAN) to make a video about Tasmania’s rich whaling history. While CAN was visiting Hobart to help galleries, libraries, archives and museums put their collections online, it took the opportunity to look at historical collections from a contemporary perspective.

While watching this three minute YouTube video, think about how stories in the news cycle relate to collections. What messages can be explored in a digital story that compare the past with issues in contemporary society?



Please email Sarah Rhodes with any ideas that CAN and its Partners could collaborate on.

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Podcasts on museum entry experience

There has been some interest on the can-talk listserv in podcasts on the museum entry experience. We have had a little dig around and come up with a starting point for further investigations in this field, including a YouTube search. When making a list of interesting videos from YouTube, CAN imagined some of the issues the current redevelopment of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery might be considering.

Podcasts and videos on museum entry experience



1. Experienceology
2. Museum Mobile
3. “Innovation in Museum Design” [Redesigning the Louvre and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)] Part I
“Innovation in Museum Design” [Redesigning the Louvre and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)] Part II
“Innovation in Museum Design” [Redesigning the Louvre and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)] Part III”
4. Broad Contemporary Art Museum LA with architect Renzo Piano: YouTube
5. Designing a museum experience: YouTube

CAN Partners also sent through links to resources on how to make podcasts and vodcasts. David Milne, at Queensland Museum, sent through an excellent link to Apple’s Guide to Making a Podcast and tips on how to make them rank highly in searches. Apple also offers a guide to finding your favourite podcast.

Here is the link to a list of museum podcasts CAN published in its Outreach Blog early last year. NSW-based museum consultant Desmond Kennard sent through museum pods 2008 list of top ten podcasts. It also hosts podcasts as an alternative or complement to iTunes.

Sarah Rhodes

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Radiology collection online and on-site

Archivist Nyree Morrison talks about how she built a display to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists and then made the material accessible to researchers online. Ms Morrison worked with the Collections Australia Network (CAN) to put the archives relating to the formation of the radiologists college on the national heritage collections database.

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Nyree Morrison, reference archivist, RANZCR

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists celebrate its 60th anniversary this year. However, the College was originally an association and known as the Australian and New Zealand Association of Radiology (1935-1942), and the Australian and New Zealand Association of Radiologists (1942-1949). The College has undergone three further name changes since it became the College of Radiologists (Australia and New Zealand) in 1949. For this anniversary, a small display was planned for the Combined Scientific Meeting (CSM) to be held in Brisbane in October this year. I would put the exhibition together but would not go to Brisbane to stage it. I was therefore relying on someone else to put the display together.

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Telegram sent by Dr Nisbet to Dr John O’Sullivan on the occasion of the inauguration of the College, 5 October 1949. Dr O’Sullivan was the last president of the ANZAR. Drs Nisbet and O’Sullivan were instrumental in the establishment of the College. Telegram conveyed by Commonwealth of Australia Post-Master General’s Department.

Before it was decided what to display, I had to find out what the facilities were at the convention centre. We were given display panels which were 2 metres in width and just less than 1 metre high. The College does not have that many aesthetically pleasing items and I was very conscious that as the exhibition would be small, it had to be as eye catching as possible. In liaison with the College’s Communications and Membership Team who is responsible for organising the annual meetings, I would show them the layout of the display and we would photograph it so that it could be put up by them in the same chronological order.

I decided to display College documents that chart its history since becoming a College over the past 60 years, with brief captions underneath. Eleven documents, ranging from A4 to A5-6 in size were taken to a professional high street copying firm. They were all individually encased in mylar, with one also being wrapped in acid-free paper and strict instructions were given that they be handled with care. The copies were ready to be picked up the next day, and I must admit I did have a moment of fear when I was handed a plastic document holder and saw the documents in them. It was then I realised they were the copies – they were that well done. For less than $50 we had copy documents and a disc containing the scanned images. We already had a colour copy of the College’s Armorial Bearings and so I decided to use that too.

I printed off a copy of the documents so that I could handle them and measured out an area on one of the Archive walls (actually the cupboards as they were the only part of the Archive with nothing on them that I could use!) to the dimensions of the display board so I could move the documents about as much as I wanted. I also needed a banner for the display board so I used the same company that I used for the documents, and within five hours had a banner made to my requirements for $90.

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I decided to use only seven of the copied documents and the image of the armorial bearings. I numbered the captions and noted what item they correlated to and drew a plan of the display. The display was photographed and I handed over all the material to the Communications and Membership Team, which was couriered to Brisbane a week before the College staff arrived.

The display was mounted with no problems what so ever and was placed in an area of the concourse outside the exhibition hall that everyone had to walk by to attend their various seminars. I was assured that a good number of people stopped and had a look.

I have to admit that putting on this very small exhibition was time consuming as I only work one day a week. Searching to find interesting relevant material was trying, but I feel that it all worked together and was relevant. As the display was of a small scale, there were no obviously no problems encountered in putting it up. Yes it did cost under $150, however the results were excellent and the copied documents are being framed and put on display in the College offices.

For more information, email Nyree Morrison

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MONA: “a subversive Disneyland for adults”

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David Walsh played ping-pong in the wharf that hosted his Festival of Music and Art (MOFO), wearing a t-shirt with: ‘I am listening to bands that don’t even exist yet’ written across his chest. This conjures an image of a man connected with his community and with the contemporary art scene. Mr Walsh invited Brian Ritchie, formerly the frontman of the Violent Femmes, to curate the annual festival exploring how art and music inform each other. International artists flew in from Serbia, Germany, the US and UK to perform, including eighties hip-hop artist Grand Master Flash for one of Hobart’s biggest concerts of the year. Even after 3000 people registered for the free event, there was still enough demand for people to colour photocopy the wristbands so they could watch the master of the turntables. Money could not buy a ticket to the event. The city felt a little tired on Friday. Many were hanging out in the Princes Wharf (PW1) resting easy on big pink beanbags watching video art from the Venice Biennale, enjoying a wine tasting comparing international wines with his Moorilla winery’s cloth label 2000 pinot noir or watching a cooking demonstration by the head chef at Moorilla’s award-winning restaurant. Whatever the activity – it was all free – accessible to everyone. But the cost of a one way ticket to Hobart last week was $450.

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FOMA is the beginning of a major injection of art and culture into Tasmania. The goal is to make people to think. The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is currently being built with the launch date to coincide with the third MOFO festival in January 2011. The museum’s name does not let it be categorised beyond being a museum of art. Walsh is often heard saying, one of our philosophies is to have no philosophy. If people walk away hating it, at least they have talked about it and have formed an opinion. The Hobart businessman who has made his fortune by gambling online has turned his efforts into building one of the most exciting art and cultural environments in Australia. MOFO is attracting cool crowds. Some looking to understand the link between music and art, others starved of live music and the rest just wanting to be part of the energetic vibe emanating from Princes Wharf (PW1), the site of the Taste of Tasmania, on Salamanca.

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Mr Walsh likes to challenge conventions and demands those who work for him to do the same. His staff must research and interrogate how things are done in the cultural sector nationally and internationally, as well as in other domains. H4, the web development company hired to build MONA’s web presence, has never built a museum website before. With one year the until launch date, they have put all of their clients on hold so they can give MONA 100 per cent of their attention. They are building the online collection and linking their web presence to the visitor experience in very exciting ways. Librarian and Information Manager Mary Lijnzaad described the process of developing the website as a partnership. It is a collaborative process, looking at what other people are doing and extrapolating that out.

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Just to illustrate the extent Mr Walsh will go to challenge ideas, he has hired architect Nonda Katsalidis, known for Australia’s tallest building Eureka Tower to design the museum underground. Most museums command attention, they are monuments to themselves. Ms Lijnzaad said, Mr Walsh wants the public to feel underwhelmed when they arrive at MONA. Taking the lift down to the lower levels symbolises going down into the subconscious. The museum’s floorplan has been designed so that it is easy to lose yourself, creating an environment so that people are open to new ideas and experiences. He wants it to be a subversive Disneyland for adults, Lijnzaad said.

Sarah Rhodes

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‘From the Archives’ streams live on Hobart FM

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Lindsay McCarthy took his career as a commercial radio disc jockey into retirement by setting up and running one of Australia’s finest sound equipment collections (apparently rivalling part of the National Film and Sound Archive). He has proved age is no barrier – uploading part of the radio and record player collection online. The president of the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania (SPAT) is also running a oral history program to record the stories of his peers. The sound preservation library has recorded noises particular to Hobart from street chatter, gatherings at market places and people singing in the street, to children at play and traffic noises.

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SPAT’s archives are not sitting in the Bellerive’s Old Post Office to gather dust either – they are being used as content for Mr McCarthy’s radio programme ‘From the Archives’. The Hobart FM show is streamed live on the Internet on Tuesdays from 2- 3pm. He plays old pieces from the SPAT collection of 30,000 records – most of which is out of copyright.

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When McCarthy was visiting Launceston recently, an old friend gave him the 1954 ‘Australian Amateur Hour’ recordings – a 1950s version of talent show Australian idol. He took the recordings home and re-recorded them onto mini-disc for “From the Archives’. Someone else brought in a box of tapes of recordings from when the Inkspots played in City Hall in 1955. After a bit of editing on his sound system at home, they were ready for the public to enjoy a little journey down memory lane.

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Sarah Rhodes

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Long Tails: Why Participate Online?

While pondering the few gem-like comments on the CAN blog some questions arose about the type of action, participation and commentators (and commentary) is out there in the Australian collecting sector via social media. There are guidelines aplenty online to help people to establish and participate in social networks using social media tools – see Darragh Doyle’s how to comment on a blog and Caroline Middlebrook’s blog commenting strategy as just two examples. There are blog lists relating to the Australian collecting sector I’ve scooped up as a small sample (e.g. archives, museums, libraries) to reflect the diversity in a part of the Australian collecting blogosphere. There are also some useful guidelines readily available online aimed at particular collecting domains or organisation types — see the blog about a social media manual being developed in the UK by Jim Richardson which appears to be drawing upon these institutional policy documents and guides for the museum sector.
The Long Tail and Learning

 

What seems to be missing is the discussion of the ‘why would I/we?’ factor and what those motivations and (in)actions reveal about the participants and the wider community. Nina Simon discusses this question at the tail end of a blog on the use of social media by museums and some interesting debate crops up in the comments on this blogpost. There are different questions to ask of oneself about what the motivations and benefits are in establishing or participating online and using social media, for work, or as a citizen. Noticeably (and impressively) there has been strong online feedback on the Australian National Cultural Policy (dialogue open until 1 Feb 2010). Glancing over the open feedback gives an immediate sense that these open online commentators are confident in their thoughts about policy direction and in using social media as citizens in a democratic manner. It would seem unusual to have anything but strong feedback in any case (perhaps worth remembering the polarised nature of public comment or feedback on issues of public interest is about asserting ones views rather than about neutrality and acquiescence). It is though useful to be reminded that what is openly available is not the total picture of the feedback offered and the open commentary may at this point have a certain characteristics of its own by comparison with feedback not published online.
The Long Tail of Fans

 

The larger questions potentially are: how much of Australian digital/social activity is through social media technologies per se and how much is happening through the collecting organisations, the practitioners and the interested public to make for thriving onsite and online communities? An allied question is how big are Australians on offering opinions and dialogue – and is that rate and type of commentary different and/or similar to other cultures? There are theses to be written no doubt in time on that front (if not already written or in process) on patterns particular to Australian participants. A search on Google and then on the Australian Digital Theses Program reveals a doctoral thesis developed at Griffith University by Gordon Fletcher about the cultural significance of web exchange through analysing popular search terms. To quote from Gordon Fletcher’s thesis abstract:

 

“Critical analysis of these higher order categories reveals six cultural traits that predominant in the apparently wide array of search terms; freeness, participation, do-it-yourself/customisation, anonymity/privacy, perversion and information richness. The thesis argues that these traits are part of a cultural complex that directly reflects the underlying motivations of contemporary western mainstream culture.”.

 

There are very good practical reasons to examine the resources committed to onsite and online priorities. Necessarily those priorities are linked to the strategic objectives of organisations and less formally so the aims of individuals. There are also cultural reasons for people to be quick or slow to comment, happy with openness or privacy in offering commentary, and desire and/or comfort levels with particular levels of openness or privacy. In terms of balance I am reminded of the value of perceiving consensus (some kind of peak in the bell curve or cluster of opinion) and the value of diversity, that is, what the long tail of commentating and commentary, and diversity in commentators, online can offer.

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