Article: "9 museums that want your legacy tech"

On 10/3/13 5:06 PM, "Eric Smith" <spacewar at gmail.com> wrote: I'm also going to say that CHM is not likely to preserve the vitality of your artifact. I'm not trying to cast aspersions, but that's just not what they do: they're a more traditional archival institution. I won't promise that LCM is going to run everything, but we're going to run as much as we can (which number increases with time). (We have fellow travelers such as the Digital Den in Cambridge that share this goal.) This is not meant as disrespect to CHM - I think that in many ways we complement each other. I just ask people to consider which institution best serves how they wish for their artifact to be preserved and presented. I've toured the Revolution exhibit and I really enjoyed it. It tells some great stories. But it is *different* from what we do at LCM. By the way, sometimes a museum (such as ours) turns down an artifact for reasons other than being "unaware of ... the historical significance". Sometimes we at LCM say, "This is outside our scope." One museum just can't preserve everything, unless your budget is truly boundless. Sometimes we say, "We don't think we can restore this." Because we are a LIVING museum, we're reluctant to take in artifacts we don't think we can bring back to operating condition. Sometimes we say, "That's really cool and really rare, but what is its place in history?" Now that one is truly a hard call, but it's one that all museums must make. I worry sometimes that artifacts from failed product lines don't get the representation they need, and I push for those that I think tell meaningful stories. But if I can't create a meaningful story for an artifact, I can't endorse its presence in a *living* museum. But lines must be drawn - only so many dollars, only so any person-hours, only so many square feet/meters. That's a dilemma for all museums of all kinds. I do think some people think we're going to save everything from every time, and that hasn't been a truth for any aspect of history or museology. With computer technology we have a huge corpus on which to draw, given the enormous productive output of the industry, and there aren't enough dollars, hours or squares to preserve it all. An embarrassment of riches, so to speak.... -- Ian