President's Report - November 2014

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