While we’re on the subject of museum collections, let’s talk for a minute about one of the biggest conundrums museums face: collecting modern stuff.
Especially technology.
When we accept donations of objects, we try to focus on things that were used by people in the Creston Valley – but technology is something that everybody uses, and it changes so quickly that there tends to be a lot of old stuff around. Just imagine what happens when that ever-changing technology gets to the point where people look at it and say, “it’s old, it belongs in a museum!”
I think our storage spaces will get really full, really quickly.
Amongst the modern objects in our collections are:
- a bag phone from the early 1990s, predecessor to the modern cell phone;
- a beta player, a number of betamax tapes from Creston Cable Video, and a few examples of other now-obsolete video formats;
- a whole range of cameras, from the earliest Brownie box cameras to relatively recent Polaroid cameras (and even a James Bond spy camera!);
- the Gestetner used to crank out the original Creston Advert (predecessor to the Advance); a posting machine evicted from the Credit Union when they moved to computers; and more typewriters than you can shake a stick at, including a couple electric ones;
- a TRS-80 computer from about 1984 – the first computer the Creston Valley Advance ever used. It’s a pretty skookum machine: built-in screen, two floppy disc drives, and – get this – 64K RAM!
None of those are particularly recent, especially given the speed with which technology changes. So, your thing-to-think-about for today is: what more recent technology should we think about adding, and why?
(Please please please just tell us in the comments – don’t drop off your favourite examples on the museum’s doorstep, ‘kay? That’s great, then!)
And we’d still love to hear your thoughts on collecting things that reflect the COVID-19 crisis.
