26-01-2023, 10:07 PM
(This post was last modified: 26-01-2023, 10:09 PM by Lucien Nunes.)
These last two posts highlight pivotal issues in the realm of vintage technology conservation field. They unmask one of the elephants in the room, which is the discrepancy between what many museums are doing and what actually needs to be done to conserve the genre for the unborn generation. I will launch a more general thread on that topic in the forum shortly. Many of its themes are clichés but I do not feel that the entirety of the vintage technology community has yet taken ownership of them.
Returning to the specific point of the conservation of tacit knowledge of Compton's organs and related products (including Strand / Compton lighting controls), I agree that it is one of the fields in which I need to get busy recording what I know. I have been studying them for some decades and some of the sources and connections I used are no longer available. We have already started building a dedicated website that will expand greatly on what is present on the old Electrokinetica site, and integrate the archive and collection records. In turn the site itself can be both archived and maintained live for as long as anyone after me will pay for the hosting. More of a challenge is finding someone who will continue the research to keep it a living resource, rather than a static one frozen in time on my demise. The field is of distinctly marginal interest and I only anticipated it being viable in a museum context when underpinned by one of the MEET philosophies, namely to integrate the obscure with the commonplace. This enables the resourcing and attention lavished on the commonplace, and the momentum that it generates, to carry along the obscure that would be unsustainable in isolation. I will probably use the organ collection to illustrate some general points that will arise in the forthcoming thread on conservation strategy mentioned above.
In this one, I will leave the philosophical issues aside and focus on the electronics and history.
Returning to the specific point of the conservation of tacit knowledge of Compton's organs and related products (including Strand / Compton lighting controls), I agree that it is one of the fields in which I need to get busy recording what I know. I have been studying them for some decades and some of the sources and connections I used are no longer available. We have already started building a dedicated website that will expand greatly on what is present on the old Electrokinetica site, and integrate the archive and collection records. In turn the site itself can be both archived and maintained live for as long as anyone after me will pay for the hosting. More of a challenge is finding someone who will continue the research to keep it a living resource, rather than a static one frozen in time on my demise. The field is of distinctly marginal interest and I only anticipated it being viable in a museum context when underpinned by one of the MEET philosophies, namely to integrate the obscure with the commonplace. This enables the resourcing and attention lavished on the commonplace, and the momentum that it generates, to carry along the obscure that would be unsustainable in isolation. I will probably use the organ collection to illustrate some general points that will arise in the forthcoming thread on conservation strategy mentioned above.
In this one, I will leave the philosophical issues aside and focus on the electronics and history.
