Documenting Collection Items

Culture and Heritage students at the University of Canberra have been using the NCACL collection for many years to learn about caring for real collections and putting them on display. Through internships with NCACL, students have worked to plan and mount exhibitions and make sure that light levels and environmental conditions would keep the books and artworks on display in good condition.

In the last two years students have also used the NCACL collection to think about how different types of collection items should be documented. As well as a description of an item, collection documentation provides the information to find out how an item relates to other items in the collection, if it is connected to interesting people and important events, what condition it is in, whether it has any hazards to be aware of and where it is so you can find it. Students have used the different types of objects in the NCACL collection to work out how to document books, the original art works for those books, and the latest addition to the collection, “ephemera”, which includes merchandise based on the books, and items that reflect people’s personal engagement with the books, such as home-made toys.

Working on the ephemera for May Gibbs’ much loved Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books, we have discovered that the content and format information used for books and artworks doesn’t really fit the ephemera items, which have multiple parts, many different materials, sometimes bizarre dimensions and even the odd hazard to watch out for!

Students have also been working on the SRA series of books about Australian animals that have been popular in school libraries since the 1970s. Many of the stories in these books are adaptations of traditional Aboriginal stories, but the books do not acknowledge this origin. Working with Indigenous scholar Ashley van den Heuvel at the University of Canberra, students thought about how research and documentation might improve readers’ knowledge about the origins of the stories and painting styles used in some of the artworks and contribute to putting these stories back in their proper context.

The collection also includes artworks that have been used in pre-digital print processes, with sticky-taped overlays showing where text would be incorporated in each page, and printing instructions in Chinese characters reflecting collaboration with a Hong Kong printing house. The end result of this project was a new understanding of how different cultures, people and processes had come together to produce the books, and creative ideas for displays that would bring these new understandings to new audiences.

In 2025 we will be looking for a new NCACL collection to explore. I might pop round next week to see what they’ve got …

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Alison Wain
Associate Professor in Cultural and Creative Futures

Discipline Lead Cultural Heritage and Conservation
University of Canberra, Australia

 

See also:
A Permanent Home – NCACL
Collecting for Future Generations – NCACL
NCACL’S May Gibbs Legacy Collection – NCACL
Restoring Bib and Bub Newspaper Comic Strips – NCACL

Posted by: NCACL | Published: 01 Mar 2025