We had a good time at the Fremantle Hospital Museum today. It takes up the entirety of N Block it seems, although we didn't really get to look at many of the exhibits because we were focussed on checking out Curley Molyneux's big plaque and then mostly with talking with the volunteer archivists who run the place. They are amazing! It's a huge collection, and they're cataloguing and digitising all of it, as well as writing up stories to display with the exhibits.
It was interesting hearing about the issues with things like integrating into the hospital's data storage system (or rather, not integrating at all), and avoiding Collections WA (partly because of its insistence on overly-detailed catalogue records that aren't feasible with such a large collection and small number of volunteers). It was good to talk to people about the issues of running a community archive as many are similar to what we face at the Buffalo Club (and maybe the wider internet in general, in some ways!). Their digitisation programme seems pretty comprehensive.
The museum has a huge collection of photos and documents relating to nurses and other people who have worked at the hospital since the late 19th Century. Fascinating to see the maps and aerial photos of the site, and to get a bit of an impromptu tour of the Knowle and Ron Doig Block. We were trying to find the location of Curley's famous drinking fountain, but it looks like it might've been in the old main entrance to the Ron Doig Block, which has been removed to make way for car parking.
There are so many connections to Fremantle in the museum's collection (although really it's mostly about medical topics and people, and not really local history). I want to go back and dig more into things like the Princess May school's involvement in the children's hospital, and get copies of some of the Board minutes relating to Curley.
I've probably rambled about it before, but the one real strength I think in small archives like this is in their ability to share material with others. It shares the knowledge, but also the burden of digital preservation, in a way that centralised systems do not (even things like Wikimedia Commons that have fully open contributions).
My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss
(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au to leave a comment.