Friends of the Launceston Mechanics' Institute
President's Report 11 November 2014
1. Report on the
CHG award and workshop on significance assessment
Firstly, my thanks to the FOLMI executive for allowing me to
attend on behalf of the group, and for the opportunity to participate in the
workshops.
The Community Heritage Grants program (CHG) is an initiative
of the National Library of Australia. The Community Heritage Grants (CHG)
program provides grants of up to $15,000 to community organisations such as
libraries, archives, museums, genealogical and historical societies, multicultural
and Indigenous groups. The grants are provided to assist with the preservation
of locally owned, but nationally significant collections of materials that are
publicly accessible including artefacts, letters, diaries, maps, photographs,
and audio visual material. In 2014, 73 grants were awarded, totalling $386,577.
The most important thing I learnt was that the CHG program
can operate in progressive stages. You must start with a grant to carry out a
Significance Assessment. Then you can move on to a Preservation Needs
Assessment, then progress to further grants for conservation activities,
collection management and training. The thing I'm going to concentrate on today
is Significance Assessment. Most of the groups attending were at this stage, and
a lot of the workshop activity was around getting a better handle on what was
meant by Significance Assessment.
Perhaps the best way to approach SA is that it is to museums
and movable heritage what the Burra Charter is to built heritage.
It is above all a way of determining where a collection fits
in the National Heritage Collection.
Significance defines the meanings and values of a cultural
heritage item or collection through research and analysis, and by assessment
against a standard set of criteria.
These criteria are central to establishing the status of
your collection.
There are four Primary Criteria or Values – Historic,
Aesthetic, Social and Research - and three comparative criteria; Provenance,
Rarity/Representativeness, Condition and Interpretive Potential.
These are the key areas investigated by a qualified assessor
who provides a report and a statement of significance.
The important thing is that a collection only needs to be
found to be of national significance in ONE each of the primary and the
comparative criteria.
So in our case we would be looking at Historic, Social and
Research Values of our collection – and its rarity as a surviving MI collection
as well as its representativeness as library collection of a type that was
important to the development of the country – comparing it to the very few
similar collections that have survived.
But we would also have claims to outstanding provenance and untapped
potential for research and interpretation. The one thing we lack is the
building that housed the collection.
We have been very fortunate to have engaged Dr Susan Marsden
an eminent historian from South Australia to carry out our assessment.
Susan is an associate member of Significance International,
and also President of the History Council of South Australia and an appointed
member of the State Records Council (SA) and of the Register Committee of the
SA Heritage Council. Past employment includes seven years as South Australian
State Historian, Visiting Fellow in the Urban Research Program at the
Australian National University, and National Conservation Manager at the
Australian Council of National Trusts.
As the key element of her assessment Susan will be here for
a site visit from Sunday December 7 until Thursday the 11th. Hopefully we can arrange
an opportunity for members and supporters to meet her during her visit.
Finally, I wanted to briefly outline our timeframe for
completing the SA and moving to the next phase.
Because of the uncertainty around our tenure at UTAS, we are
anxious to keep moving quickly. There is an opportunity to complete the SA by
April, the earliest possible date for submission and so be able to apply for
further funding in the 2015 round which closes on May 4 2015. If we waited
until the final report deadline in November, we would not be able to apply for
more funding until 2016. The next step would be for us to have a Preservation
Needs Assessment done which would focus on the state of the collection and the
urgent need for suitable storage, care and access. Also, if the SA demonstrates
that the collection is of national significance we will be much better placed
to pursue further funding from other sources, so it becomes a crucial document
for our future.
2. Report on
progress in work on the LMI Collection
These are some of the volunteer projects that have been undertaken since our last meeting;
• The delivery
of the LMI collection to us from LINC Tasmania has been completed with the
transfer of the Popular Fiction Collection. I should qualify this by saying
that further items continue to arrive as the LINC staff finalise their
reorganisation of the Launceston library building, and in the last few weeks
more books, maps and catalogues have arrived.
• We have
conducted a detailed survey of a large sample of the non-fiction collection
comparing it with holdings in other collections;
LMI Non-fiction Sample (n=367)
TROVE Listed
1. Libraries
listed on Trove held 276 titles in the same edition as that held by LMI
(75.2%). Of these 53 (14.4% of the sample) were held by only one other library.
2. Libraries
listed on Trove held a further 47 titles but only in a different edition to
that held by LMI. (12.8%)
3. Libraries
listed on Trove offered access to a further 39 titles in digital format but did
not hold the printed book. i.e. only LMI held a print copy of these titles.
(10.6%)
4. LMI held
copies of a further 5 titles that were not listed on Trove in either print or
microform editions and for which no digital access was available. (1.4%)
Ballarat MI
Of the 367 titles in our sample, 86 were found on the
Ballarat NF database (23.4%).
However of these 31 were the same title but in a different
edition, so there were only 55 exact matches (14.9%).
• Sue McClarron
has completed a detailed descriptive survey of all known printed catalogues of
the Institute which has provided valuable insights to the way the collection
was organised and reorganised as it grew through the nineteenth century.
• We have a
complete set of digital photographs of all known surviving Accession Registers,
from 1881 to 1945.
• We have
identified and recorded all LMI books still held in the Launceston Local
Studies collections.
• We have
instigated several projects to highlight items of special interest in the
collection – including surveys of our holdings of Dr Lardner's Cabinet
Cyclopedia (over 100 items), books by and about lady travellers and explorers
(something Anna Lynde one of our volunteers has been working on for the last
two months), the survival rate of books in the 1906 Polynesian collection,
collected and published galleries of bookplates, binders tickets, invitation
and membership tickets on a Flickr website, we have recorded the collection's
holdings of Nineteenth Century first edition novels in two- and three- volumes
(known as the Three-Decker Collection).
• In partnership
with Andrew Parsons the librarian at QVMAG, we have identified and transferred
books from other institutes and old public libraries such as Evandale, Deloraine,
and local circulation and church libraries, to the QVMAG collection.
Peter Richardson
President
