A few years ago it seemed fashionable for cultural institutions to create a ‘My [insert institution name]’ space on their website where visitors could create their own online exhibits from collection materials. It bothered me at the time because it seemed to be a case of creating silos within silos. What could people do with their collections once they’d assembled them?

I was reminded of this recently as I undertook my Christmas-break mini project to think about Trove integration with Zotero. Some years ago I created a Zotero translator for the Trove newspaper zone, but I’d much rather we just exposed metadata within Trove pages that Zotero (and other tools like Hypothes.is and Mendeley) could pick up without any special code. More about that soon…

However. embedded metadata only addresses part of the problem — there’s also questions around tools and workflows. Trove includes a number of simple tools that enable users to annotate and organise resources — tags, comments, and lists. Tags and comments… well you know what they are. Lists are just collections of resources, and like tags, they can be public or private.

They may not be terribly exciting tools, but they are very heavily used. More than 2 million tags have been added by Trove users, but it’s lists that have shown the most growth in recent times. There are currently more than 47,000 lists and 30,000 of those are public. That’s a pretty impressive exercise in collection building. What are the lists about? A few months ago I harvested the titles of all public lists and threw them into Voyant for a quick word frequency check.

Given what we know about Trove users, it wasn’t surprising to see that many of the lists related to family history, but there are a few wonderful oddities buried in there as well. I love to be surprised by the passions of Trove users.

I suspect these tools are popular because they’re simple and open-ended. There are few constraints on what you can use for a tag or add to a list. Following some threads about game design recently I came upon a discussion of ‘underspecified’ tools — ‘the use of which you can never fully predict’. By underspecifying we leave open possibilities for innovation, experimentation and play. It seems like a pretty good design approach for the cultural heritage sector.

But wait a minute, you might be wondering, what sort of Trove Manager magic did I have to weave in order to extract those thousands of list titles? None, none at all. You could do exactly the same thing.

I’ve been talking a lot in recent months about Trove as a platform rather than a website — something to build on. One of our main construction tools is, of course, the Trove API. I suppose a good cultural heritage API is also underspecified — focused enough to be useful, but fuzzy enough to encourage a bit of screwing around. What you may not know about the Trove API is that as well as giving you access to around 300 million resources, it lets you access user comments, tags and lists.

I’m looking forward to researchers using the API to explore the various modes of meaning-making that occur around resources in Trove. But right now one thing it offers is portability — the collections people make can be moved. And that brings us back to Zotero.

Why should a Trove user have to decide up front whether they want to use Zotero or create a Trove list? Pursuing Europeana’s exciting vision of putting collections in our workflows we need to recognise that workflows change, projects grow, and new uses emerge. We should support and encourage this by making it as easy as possible for people to move their stuff around.

So of course I had to build something.

My Christmas project has resulted in some Python code that lets you export a Trove list or tag to a Zotero collection — API to API. Again it’s a simple idea, but I think it opens up some interesting possibilities for things like collaborative tagging projects — with a few lines of code hundreds of tagged items could be saved to Zotero for further organisation or annotation.

Along the way I ended up starting a more general Trove-Python library — it’s very incomplete, but it might be useful to someone. It’s all on GitHub — shared, as usual, not because I think the code is very good, but because I think it’s really important to share examples of what’s possible. Hopefully someone will find a slender spark of inspiration in my crappy code and build something better. Needless to say, this isn’t an official Trove product.

So what do you do if you want to export a list or tag?

First of all get yourself Python 2.7 and set up a virtualenv where you can play without messing anything up. Then install my library…

git clone https://github.com/Trove-Toolshed/trove-python.git
cd trove-python
python setup.py install

You’ll also need to install PyZotero. Once that’s done you can fire up Python and export a list from the command line like this…

from pyzotero import zotero
from trove_python.trove_core import trove
from trove_python.trove_zotero import export

zotero_api = zotero.Zotero('[Your Zotero user id]', 'user', '[Your Zotero API key]')
trove_api = trove.Trove('[Your Trove API key]')

export.export_list(list_id='[Your Trovelist id]', zotero_api=zotero_api, trove_api=trove_api)

Obviously you’ll also need to get yourself a Trove API key, and a Zotero key for your user account.

Exporting items with a particular tag is just as easy…

from pyzotero import zotero
from trove_python.trove_core import trove
from trove_python.trove_zotero import export

zotero_api = zotero.Zotero('[Your Zotero user id]', 'user', '[Your Zotero API key]')
trove_api = trove.Trove(['Your Trove API key'])
exporter = export.TagExporter(trove_api, zotero_api)

exporter.export('[Your tag]')

What do you end up with? Here’s my test list on Trove and the resulting Zotero collection. Here’s a set of resources tagged with ‘inigo’, and here’s the collection I created from them. You’ll notice that I added a few little extras, like attaching pdf copies where they’re available.

Sorry, no GUIs, no support, and not much documentation. Just a bit of rough code and some ideas to play with.

Notes from a talk I gave at the Digital Treasures Symposium, 21 June 2013, University of Canberra.

Over the last couple of weekends I’ve been building a bot. Let me introduce you to the TroveNewsBot.

TroveNewsBot is just a simple script that periodically checks for messages from Twitter, uses those messages to create queries in Trove’s newspaper database, and tweets back the results.

@TroveNewsBot Grant Featherston

— Michelle Mortimer (@chelle_mortimer) June 17, 2013

Possibly the greatest bot ever “@TroveNewsBot: @chelle_mortimer 14 Dec 1952: 'good design' http://t.co/no39oTANTc”

— Michelle Mortimer (@chelle_mortimer) June 17, 2013

TroveNewsBot’s birth was, however, not without some pain. I ran into difficulty with Twitter’s automated spam police. At one stage everytime my bot tweeted, its Twitter account was suspended.

Twitter’s bots didn’t like my bot. [:(]

The problem has since been resolved — I think I must have done something when I was testing that upset the spam bots — but it did lead me to read in detail Twitter’s policies on spam and automation. This sentence in particular caused me to reflect:

The @reply and Mention functions are intended to make communication between users easier, and automating these processes in order to reach many users is considered an abuse of the feature.

So what is a user and what is communication? I read this sentence as suggesting that communications between individual human users were somehow more real, more authentic than automatically generated replies. But is a script tweeting someone a link to to a newspaper article that they might be interested in really less authentic than a lot of the human-generated traffic on the net?

Amongst the messages I received when I revealed TroveNewsBot to the world earlier this week was this:

@wragge I love Mr. Trove Bot – nice work! Not an object talking, its a whole database.

— Alli Burness (@alli_burnie) June 17, 2013

And later from the same person:

@wragge Bugs are ok, nice to watch Trove Bot flicker to life. Always thought clxns have a personality, look forward to seeing Trove's.

— Alli Burness (@alli_burnie) June 17, 2013

Even as we live an increasing amount of our lives ‘connected’, still there remains a tendency to assume that experiences mediated through online technologies are somehow less authentic than those that take place in this space that we often refer to as ‘the real world’.

In the realm of cultural heritage, digitisation is frequently assumed to be a process of loss. We create surrogates, or derivatives — useful, but somehow inferior representations of ‘the real thing’.

Now let’s just all admit that, yes, we like the smell of old books, and that we can’t read in the bath with our iPad, and move beyond the sort of fetishism that often accompanies these sorts of discussions.

Yes, of course, digital and physical manifestations are different, the point is whether we get anywhere by arguing that one is necessarily inferior to the other.

A recent article in the Times Literary Supplement expressed concern at the money being spent on the manuscript digitisation programs that the author argued were ‘proceeding unchecked and unfocused, deflecting students into a virtual world and leaving them unequipped to deal responsibly with real rare materials’. Yes, there may be aspects of a physical page that a digital copy cannot represent, but as Alistair Dunning pointed out in response to the article, there’s no simple binary opposition:

The digital does not replace the analogue, but augments it, sometimes in dramatic and sometimes in subtle ways.

In his keynote address to the ‘Digital Transformers’ conference, Jim Mussell similarly argued against a simplistic understanding of digital deficiencies.

The key is to reconceive loss as difference and use the way the transformed object differs to reimagine what it actually was. Critical encounters with digitized objects make us rethink what we thought we knew.

I’m very pleased to be an adjunct here at the University of Canberra, but I’ve always felt a bit of a fraud around people like Mitchell when it comes to talking about visualisation. I’m actually much more comfortable with words than pictures. So why am I here talking to you today?

I think it’s because what we’re discussing today, what the Digital Treasures Program is about, is not just visualisation. It’s about transformation. It’s about taking cultural heritage collections and changing them. Changing what we can do with them. Changing how we see them. Changing how we think about them.

It’s about creating spaces within which we can have ‘critical encounters with digitized objects’ that ‘make us rethink what we thought we knew’.

And that to me is very exciting.

What might these transformations look like? Who knows? This is research, it should take us places we don’t expect and can’t predict.

However, for the sake of convenience today I’ve tried to define a few possible categories — most, admittedly, based on my own work. But I do so in the hope that the achievements of the Digital Treasures program will soon make my categories look ridiculously inadequate.

Analysis

When we have stuff in digital form — and by stuff I mean both collection metadata and digital objects — we can isolate particular characteristics and add them up, compare them, graph them. We can start to see patterns that we couldn’t see before.

• Google Ngram viewer
• Digital humanities — growing number of tools
• Not just texts — ImagePlot
• Can be simple — history thesis titles from Trove viewed in Voyant Tools
• QueryPic
• The Front Page

Assembly

Putting a lot of similar things together in a way that enables us to see them differently.

• Series Browser
• The real face of White Australia

Juxtaposition

Putting different things together in a way that enables us to find connections or similarities.

• Sembl
• History Wall

Serendipity

Displaying something unexpected or random.

• The Future of the Past
• Headline Roulette
• TroveNewsBot — use #luckydip for a random article

Mobilisation

Putting things in new contexts, new conceptual spaces, new physical spaces, new geospatial spaces. Creating interventions and explorations.

• The People Inside
• TroveNewsBot – Today’s news yesterday
• Pixtory
• Kits for Cultural History

This is a very limited catalogue of possibilities, but meagre as it is I think its enough to demonstrate that the overwhelming feature of digital cultural collections is not loss or deficiency, but opportunity and inspiration.

In fact I’m less worried about the deficiencies of digital representation than I am about the possibility that we might end up doing too much — that we might become so skilled in design and transformation that we end up overdetermining the experience of our users, that we end up doing too much of the thinking for them.

It seems to me that when it comes to digital cultural collections an important part of the transformation process is knowing where to leave the gaps and spaces that invite feeling, reflection and critique. We have to find ways of representing what is missing, of acknowledging absence and exclusion. We have to be able to expose our arguments and assumptions, to be honest about our failures and limitations. We have to be prepared to leave a few raw edges, some loose threads that encourage users to unravel our carefully-woven tapestries.

As I was developing the TroveNewsBot I realised I needed some sort of avatar. So of course I started searching in the Trove newspaper database for robots — there I found Mr George Robot.

George Robot, ‘described as the greatest electro-mechanical achievement of the age’ toured Australia in 1935 and 1936. As one newspaper described, he:

rises and sits as requested, talks, sings, delivers an address on the most abstruse topics, gnashes his electric teeth in rage or derision, while he accentuates his remarks by the most natural movements of arms and hands

But it wasn’t just George’s technical sophistication that inspired comment. Articles also appeared that described George’s love for Mae West and his admiration for Hitler.

Robots provide us with an opportunity not just to marvel at their technological wizardry, but also to think about what it really is to be human.

@wragge Bugs are ok, nice to watch Trove Bot flicker to life. Always thought clxns have a personality, look forward to seeing Trove's.

— Alli Burness (@alli_burnie) June 17, 2013

In the same way, as we start to have new types of conversations with online collections, to explore their many-faceted personalities, we will of course be exploring ourselves.

The digital transformation of cultural collections is not about showcasing technology but about creating new online spaces in which we can simply be human.

The ever-informative Twitter alerted me recently to the History Trust of South Australia’s object of the month. It made me think that it would be nice if there was some way of bringing together all those objects, photos and documents featured by our cultural institutions. Some sort of combined RSS feed perhaps?

Something like this…

Well, yes… I couldn’t resist having a go. My tool of choice for this was Yahoo Pipes which has various modules for manipulating and creating RSS feeds. Check out my script on the Yahoo Pipes site to create a badge like this, play some more or inspect its innards. If you’re feeling adventurous you can even clone the script and tinker away yourself – it’s the best way to learn.

At the moment the script aggregrates content from the Flickr photostreams of:

• National Archives of Australia
• State Records NSW
• State Library of NSW
• State Library of Queensland
• State Library of South Australia
• Australian War Memorial
• Powerhouse Museum

These are mixed up with the contents of the Powerhouse’s ‘Object of the week‘ blog and the NAA’s ‘Find of the Month‘. I’m happy to add more sources – leave your suggestions below.

Most of it was ridiculously easy. I just added the RSS feeds from Flickr and the Powerhouse blog, then fed them through a module to sort them into date order. ‘Find of the month’ was trickier because there was no existing RSS feed – time for some screen-scraping! First I scraped a list of the urls for 2009, then for each month I pulled out the title and date, as well as the first paragraph to act as a description, and the first image. Then I turned all these bits and pieces into an RSS feed and joined it up with the rest.

Yahoo Pipes makes this sort of thing simple, even for non-coders. Interestingly, too, it’s not just a matter of creating an RSS feed – as you can see Yahoo Pipes emits the data in a variety of formats. You can subscribe to the RSS feed, create a badge or slurp up the data in JSON to power some new application.

Tim Sherratt, review of Treasures of the Museum, Victoria, Australia and Land Nation People: Stories from the National Museum of Australia, in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 16, no. 1, 2005, pp. 122-125.

Australia is blessed, it seems, with a frightening abundance of treasures. A quick survey of our cultural institutions reveals an escalating ‘treasures race’, as libraries, museums, and archives bombard the public with accounts of their rarest, most beautiful, and most interesting items. The State Library of Victoria, for example, has published a lavish description of its ‘treasures’, and features them prominently on its redesigned website. The National Library of Australia also has an online display of its most treasured holdings, hoping to bring in sponsorship for a permanent ‘treasures gallery’. Meanwhile, the ‘Treasures Gallery’ at the National Archives of Australia is already up and running, while the South Australian Museum guides visitors around a ‘treasures trail’. The Australian Museum recently presented their ‘treasures’ in a special exhibition, and even the University of Melbourne has catalogued the highlights of its collections in a glossy book of ‘treasures’. Celebrating its 150^th birthday, the Museum of Victoria has made an impressive entry into the fray, with a well-designed treasures website, a treasures trail for visitors, and a beautiful volume simply entitled Treasures of the Museum.

All this treasure hunting might be seen a sign of conservative pressure upon our cultural institutions. Instead of seeking to enlarge their roles as places of research, interpretation and debate, it seems safer to fall back on familiar stereotypes of vaults and storehouses, keeping safe the nation’s heritage. Treasures are, by their nature, precious things — often protected by ‘lock and key’, ‘hidden’ from casual scrutiny. It is a label that promotes difference over familiarity, a feeling of reverence and awe over our ability to engage and connect. On the other hand, in an age of interactive exhibits and virtual museums, it is rather reassuring to realise that objects still provide such a potent source of meaning. Institutions trade on their treasures because we crave the experience of authenticity. We want the feeling of wonder, recognition and surprise that only comes from getting up close to the ‘real thing’.

In any case, cultural ‘treasures’ can be identified in a nuanced and reflective way, as Treasures of the Museum well demonstrates. Some of the objects it describes are beautiful, some are perplexing, some are funny, some are horrifying. Seemingly commonplace items are revealed as amongst the most challenging and evocative, such as the red vinyl suitcase with which Cuc Lam fled Vietnam in 1978. That most treasured of treasures, Phar Lap, is included of course. However, ‘the most famous quadruped in Australia’ is introduced by a guest contributor, Phillip Adams, whose recollection of his own childhood fascination, of ‘nose prints on the glass case’, focuses attention not on the object but on our own experiences and memories. The majority of entries, illustrated by a magnificent series of photographs, are by museum staff, and vary in quality and tone. Some are merely descriptive, others offer intriguing fragments of larger stories. There is much pleasure and interest to be gained from repeated dipping and browsing.

Whilst no doubt wishing to claim its own share of treasures, the National Museum of Australia chooses to cast itself not as a repository, but as a ‘storyteller’. Seeking to interpret the ‘national story’ is a brave undertaking, as evidenced by the criticism that has dogged the museum since its opening. Land Nation People: Stories from the National Museum of Australia is a determined restatement of the museum’s commitment ‘to telling the stories of Australia and Australians, and debating the key issues, events and people that have shaped and influenced our nation’. The book provides a condensed version of the museum itself, presenting major themes and selected objects from each of its exhibition areas: ‘First Australians’, ‘Horizons’, ‘Nation’, and ‘Tangled destinies’. With the exhibitions set to change in response to a review foisted on the museum by its critics, the book is an interesting historical document in itself. While the Museum of Victoria celebrates its long and illustrious past, the National Museum of Australia seeks to record the ambitions and achievements of its first few, turbulent years.

By unashamedly drawing attention to the process and practice of storytelling, the National Museum challenges curators, historians, and visitors to face up to the difficulties of narrative. With conservative commentators calling for the reinstitution of grand narratives of Australia’s progress all the way from Cook to cricket, there needs to be greater acceptance that the crafting of engaging and insightful stories from the complexities and contradictions of the past is hard, skilled, and creative work. There are no easy answers.

That said, there is nothing particularly innovative about the storytelling in Land Nation People. The stories are colourful and interesting, though rarely surprising, the themes are important, and like the Treasures of the Museum, the book assembles an intriguing collection of objects and illustrations. Indeed, despite the possible tension between ‘treasures’ and ‘stories’, there is much in the two books that is similar. The organisation of Treasures of the Museum also reflects the institution’s current structure, with the treasures divided into their respective collection areas of ‘Australian Society and Technology’, ‘Indigenous Cultures’, and ‘Sciences’. This is uninspired and unfortunate: Weary Dunlop’s medical instruments, for example, are uncomfortably tacked on to the end of ‘Sciences’, while the anthropological collections of Baldwin Spencer and Donald Thompson, featured in ‘Indigenous cultures’, are separated from their collectors who are locked up in the ‘Sciences’ section. If you are going to take a ‘treasures’ approach, why impose disciplinary boundaries at all? Interestingly, the companion website offers an alternative structure, grouping objects under such headings as ‘Celebrity’, ‘Messages’, ‘Journeys’, and ‘Survivors’.

More importantly, of course, both books are concerned with the relationship between object and story. ‘Museum objects’, remarks the Museum of Victoria’s CEO, ‘are like comets travelling through time and space, trailing streams of meanings’. Both books seek ways of making these meanings visible, and in doing so they reveal connections, contrasts and queries. This process is more explicit in Land Nation People, but Treasures of the Museum traverses much the same thematic territory, relying on assemblage instead of argument to explore the broader significance of its objects. The experience of immigration and arrival feature prominently in both, as does the complexity of indigenous culture. Both also seek to document ways in which we have come to know and understand the continent.

The ‘Tangled Destinies’ section of Land Nation People is most obviously concerned with the interaction of people and environment, but examples of change and adaptation are spread across both volumes. One has the story of William Farrer and his ‘Federation’ wheat, the other counters with the stump-jump plough. The sophistication of indigenous technology, and the ability of indigenous people to adapt to environmental and cultural change are well demonstrated. Both books feature a display of ‘Kimberley points’—spearheads crafted not just from traditional materials, but also from ceramics and glass.

Gesturing towards the supposed inventive streak within the Australian character, Land Nation People introduces two of the best known—and perhaps most overrated—Australian inventions under the banner of ‘Nation’. Yes, where would we be without the Victa mower and the Hills hoist? Treasures of the Museum takes us into less familiar realms with the black box flight recorder and the Shephard micro-ruling engine, which, in the late nineteenth century, pushed the limits of precision measurement. Technologies of measurement and control appear in a variety of guises, reflecting the desire of European settlers to define the limits and boundaries of their new possession. Artefacts from the geodetic survey of Victoria can be contrasted with the Anton Breinl’s hot-air cabinet, used to study the effects of the tropical climate on white workers—both speak to questions of possession and legitimacy. The clock used to maintain standard time throughout Victoria seems to have little in common with the field trowel used by archaeologist John Mulvaney. But both sought to redefine our conception of time: one brought local timekeeping practices within a centralised system, the other helped locate the human occupation of Australia within the immense span of deep time.

The natural sciences, of course, dominate the scientific collections of the Museum of Victoria, reflecting both the nature of the disciplines and the history of the institution. However, featured prominently amongst its ‘treasures’ are not just collections of birds, insects, minerals, and fossils, but the people who assembled them—the collectors themselves. John Gould, Alfred Russel Wallace, William Blandowski, and even Charles Darwin, make an appearance. This is an important inclusion, because it emphasises the process of collecting, the way in which scientific knowledge itself is constructed. Although most of the national science collections went elsewhere, the National Museum effectively uses the stories of Harry Burrell and Colin Mackenzie to similar ends. The lives and works of such individuals offers insight not just into the development of biology, but into the passion for collecting, understanding, and knowing, that motivates science in general.

While it is perhaps the historical and aesthetic dimensions of the scientific collections that make them most appealing, their continuing role in research is vitally important. Treasures of the Museum notes the scientific significance of the many type specimens within its collections, as well as the ongoing work of its staff to develop a cryogenic collection of tissue samples from rare and threatened species. Such a reminder that the collections themselves are living, growing things offers further complexity to the idea of ‘treasures’. Strangely, while the National Museum describes work to conserve and develop the National Historical Collection, there is little mention of its own research activities, particularly in environmental and indigenous history. Surely this too is a story worth telling.

This omission adds to the rather static feeling of Land Nation and People. As a snapshot of the museum, complete with obligatory corporate guff about its cutting edge multimedia technology and innovative architecture, the book seems to be more of a record of a visit­—a reminder or a souvenir—rather than something to be explored and enjoyed for its own sake. Treasures of the Museum, on the other hand, offers the twin pleasures of familiarity and surprise. Museum-tragics like myself, who spent happy days wandering amongst the old Swanston Street exhibitions, will discover many favourites amidst the ‘treasures’. One of the goldfield models is included, as well as the wax fruits and the working models case. At the same time, you have the sense that you are peeking behind the scenes, gaining access to wonders rarely seen in public.

The National Museum is committed to telling a diverse range of stories, but this worthy aim does not seem well-served by Land Nation People. The attempt to downsize the exhibitions for book consumption has taken away any feeling of exploration or uncertainty—it all seems a little too controlled. It is precisely this feeling of exploration that makes Treasures of the Museum so much fun to dip into. There’s more space here to imagine, wonder, and connect. There is much left unsaid, many questions unanswered, and the entries are frustratingly brief. But you are left with the feeling that there is much more to know, many more stories to tell, many more treasures to be revealed.

As a suburban teenager, one of the highlights of my school holidays was a trip into ‘town’. This expedition into the wilds of central Melbourne always included a wander around the Science Museum, then housed snugly with the National Museum and the State Library behind the imposing columns of 328 Swanston Street.

Naturally I pressed all the buttons I could, making all the engines start and the models come to life. I played noughts and crosses against a ‘computer’ that regularly cheated. But most of all I just stood in front of the glass-fronted cases and marvelled at the collections — the rows and rows of swords, the wax apples, the radioactive sample with its chattering geiger counter. Between visits I embroidered complex daydreams where the deserted building was mine and all its treasures lay waiting.

The Science Museum is now a division of the Museum of Victoria, with a new site, a new building and a new name — Scienceworks. The long queues awaiting entry each weekend are evidence that Scienceworks, opened in March 1992, is a great success. It’s fun, and it’s informative, and everyone should go, ok?

Spotswood, one of Melbourne’s inner-western industrial suburbs, provides an ideal location for Scienceworks. The factories surround the museum like an industrial theme park, an authentic landscape where people and technology jostle for space and power. Walking from the station you pass a glass factory where red-glowing bottles can be glimpsed as they are propelled along the production line. Look up and the massive Westgate Bridge looms oppressively near.

The new Scienceworks building is itself styled along industrial lines, but the site has its own measure of Victorian grandeur — a disused sewerage pumping station constructed in the 1890s. Here visitors can view the steam engines (currently under restoration) that propelled Melbourne’s muck along the main sewer to Werribee. Interpretative signs tell not just of the technological achievements involved, but of the disease and sanitation problems of ‘Marvellous Smellbourne’, and of the experiences of workers at the pumping station — including those who had to keep the pumps clear of debris! Sydney may have its Powerhouse, but Melbourne has its ..umm… Pumphouse?

The new Scienceworks building has both permanent and temporary exhibition spaces. The four permanent exhibitions are Inventions, Energy, Travel and Materials. Each of these draws on the museum’s extensive collections to demonstrate not just scientific principles, but the role of science and technology in our everyday lives. Of course this latter phrase is one that slips readily from the tongues of science communicators, but how do you encourage people to make this connection?

One way is by using familiar, local examples. The Materials exhibition includes sections on the Bionic Ear and the Plastic Banknote. A cable tram and the obligatory Holden feature in Travel. The Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer, which for some time sat forlornly in a corner of the entrance hall at Swanston Street, now occupies a more appropriate position in Inventions, together with the Black Box Flight Recorder and a periscopic rifle, invented in the trenches during World War One. Another old favourite from the former site is Carl Nordstrom’s detailed models of the Victorian goldfields, constructed in the late 1850s, which are used in the mining section of Materials. In some cases the stories behind the objects could be developed more, nonetheless they do provide reference points where visitors can make connections with their own experience.

The recognition factor is also cleverly exploited in another section of Inventions. Here levers, pulleys, and inclined planes are illustrated not just by hands-on exhibits, but by archival photographs called up on touch screens — what we see are the abstract principles at work on farms, in factories or homes. Visitors can begin to recognise pulleys or levers in their own life’s history — ‘Grandma had one just like that!’ In a similar way, the Energy exhibition challenges you to provide the energy for some ‘old-fashioned’ technologies, such as a manually-powered washing-machine and a hand-saw.

Other more critical connections can be made by focussing on issues related to technological development. This is most successfully achieved in the Travel exhibition, which asks visitors to consider, amongst other things, the impact of ‘Fordism’ and the nature of life on the assembly-line. Likewise, environmental issues are raised in both Materials and Energy.

What is lacking is a window onto the scientific workplace. There is little attempt to allow visitors to gain a feeling for the actual practise of science. ‘Performance science’ is presented in the Scienceworks theatre but this is altogether different from life in the lab. The Museum of Victoria is itself a working scientific institution, though you would hardly know it from the displays at Scienceworks. Presumably this is because of the separation of the Science and Technology and Natural History Divisions within the Museum structure, but surely there are ways in which the scientific work of the Museum can be displayed within the Scienceworks setting? Having been fortunate enough to have toured some of the natural history collections while they were still at the Swanston Street site, I can attest to the fascination of ‘raw science’ — science observed and experienced, rather than interpreted.

This sense of fascination relates to what the Senior Curator of Scienceworks, Martin Hallett, has described as the ‘evocative’ as opposed to ‘evidential’ function of museum objects. This ‘evocative’ role is, I believe, important in allowing people to perceive the significance of science and technology within the context of their own lives. This becomes clearer when Scienceworks is contrasted with the growing band of interactive science centres that supposedly allow you to ‘explore’ science. The types of exploration that can actually take place are constrained by the programmed nature of the exhibits. The expectation is that you will learn, not feel. Objects, however, can embody a wide range of messages, which need not be articulated for them to be effective. One Scienceworks exhibit that sticks in my mind was simply a display case in Energy full of electrical appliances — heaters, irons, tea-makers. Freed from any evidential function these appliances trigger personal responses — as with the wax apples and swords I remember so clearly. It is not so much the scientific content as the contact that is important. We can’t expect that science museums will suddenly make everything clear — ‘Oh yeah, science, I understand that’ — but they can encourage us to not understand science and technology in a meaningful way. We might not be able to explain the science, but we’ll have made some deep-seated connection with it.

History has an important role to play here and it is significant that Scienceworks has appointed a Curator of History of Technology, Richard Gillespie. By populating the scientific and technological landscape with people, issues, events, questions and problems, history opens up an intellectual and emotional space around the facts and theories. Is this a different sort of history, or history for a different audience? As the debate over the meaning of ‘public’ history continues, perhaps it is time for historians of Australian science to join the fray and begin to consider what public history means in the context of science and technology. If we are serious in wanting to help people understand the role of science and technology in Australian society and culture, it seems to me that we must allow them space to tell their own stories, to mount their personal exhibitions, to build their own daydreams. This is the space I wandered (wondered?) in as a boy, and I was pleased to find pockets still at Scienceworks.