4 Oct
2013
4 Oct
'13
8:04 a.m.
I wish the CHM had a local LCM arm to it. It is a tough call on what
the charter should be. If they did, many of the more common machines
could find a life in a museum that would otherwise be lost.
I do have a question. Does the LCM have any kind of training
for those that interact with the machines? How does it deal
with vandals and sticky fingers?
Hearing stories from CHM, I was just wondering what you do
to deal with such things.
Dwight
From: IanK at LivingComputerMuseum.org
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Article: "9 museums that want your legacy tech"
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 00:44:42 +0000
On 10/3/13 5:06 PM, "Eric Smith" <spacewar at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, October 3, 2013, Jim Stephens 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
I really think it is unfortunate there are two
TCHM's (if there are,
have
not read the article).
I don't think there are. There certainly is a computer museum in Seattle,
but it's LCM, not CHM. (AFAIK, there's no TCHM.)
because I've recommended and plan to vector
all I have of interest to
the
Mountain View one.
While I certainly encourage people to do that, please bear in mind that
you
generally can NOT expect CHM to accept most items that are proposed for
donations. They are, of necessity, very selective.
Unfortunately sometimes they turn down donations because they are unaware
of (or underestimate) the historical significance of a particular
artifact.
CHM has some excellent curators, but they can't be experts on everything.
If you offer to donate something that you believe has exceptional
historical significance, be sure to document that in detail.
Eric