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Significance second edition

Fifth Announcement 2 July 2008

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Do you have any general comments on the Significance 2.0 Workshop or this page? If so, please leave them here.

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By Janet Howse @ Tuesday, 29 July 2008 11:03 AM

I notice from participants at the workshop that one represented a local government authority and apart from that person, everyone else was from the large institutions or are consultants in the area. Why aren't professionals in smaller institutions involved? It may be that there was an invitation but no one took it up! In which case, my email is totally unnecessary! It would be good to be able to air the issues facing the small organisations with one or two members of staff at such a workshop. I would also be interested in the use of significance in collections which are both archival and have musem/heritage objects (of which school archives a prime example).

By Alison Wain @ Tuesday, 16 December 2008 1:44 PM

I am currently doing a PhD looking at the way people value large technology heritage, and the ways in which these values lead them to preserve and present that heritage. I believe that the size and complexity of many of these objects makes them qualitatively different to manage from other collections. Because of the level of resource commitment they require for instance, many of them, particularly operating ones, are in private hands, so significance to an individual is a key aspect of their preservation. Also, operational ones are often maintained in such a way as to facilitate preservation of the skills and culture of using them, rather than to preserve the historic fabric itself. These concepts are a bit outside the mainstream of heritage collections and significance assessments, and a number of people have mentioned difficulty in fitting them into existing legislative and ethical frameworks for managing (and funding) heritage. I think that these sorts of concepts can be articulated within the frameworks being discussed for Significance 2.0, but feel that there may need to be some large technology specific guidelines or examples to help people adapt the existing guidelines to the large technology niche. This is particularly so because so much of this heritage is in the hands of private individuals or societies, and there are so few heritage professionals with experience and training in this area available to assist them, either as consultants or through outreach programs from institutions.

I would also like to say that I find these discussions on the development of Significance 2.0 extremely interesting and valuable and I hope they remain accessible as an online archive after Significance 2.0 is published.

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