Coming up - Heritage and Hand-Crafted Wooden Boat Festival!

This year's Sea Cavalcade will feature the return of the museum's Heritage and Hand-Crafted Wooden Boat Festival! Come on down on Sunday, July 25, to see a unique collection of new and vintage handmade wooden boats from all over the Sunshine Coast. They'll be shown from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM on the flat, easy-access Sunday market area in Holland Park in Lower Gibsons, within view of Gibsons' historic harbour. There'll be something there to please everyone with an interest in boats, handcrafted woodwork, or local history and traditions.

If you have a small (under 18 feet) wooden boat that you'd like to include in this exhibition, contact the organizer, Larry Westlake, as soon as possible! He can be reached at 604-885-0744, or at info@larrywestlake.com. You can also pick up registration forms right here at the Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives.

We'd love to see you down here.

Digitize!

This has to be one of the most satisfying tasks I've taken on here at the museum:


Missing from the picture are the three boxes of cassette tapes that I'm digitizing, using the equipment pictured here! The cassette tapes contain recordings of oral history interviews that date back to 1978. The interviews were conducted by Elphinstone Pioneer Museum (Gibsons' original museum and an SCMA precursor) staff and volunteers, and feature the voices of an array of long-time locals, many of whom are no longer living. There are stories about logging, fishing, homesteading, housework, schoolteachers, one-room schools, social life, and much more. They're absolutely precious - and vulnerable, too. Cassette tapes don't last. The tape is extremely fragile (especially when it's old), the mechanisms inside them can get all gummed up. They're not a stable medium for storing such important information.

So, one by one, I'm digitizing these old cassettes. The tape deck in the picture is equipped with a USB connection. A cable connects the deck to the computer, which records the sound coming out of the tape deck using a simple, free program called Audacity. Once the tape's played out, I save the sound file in both .wav and .mp3 format, burn the works to a DVD, and voila - accessible oral history!

It's a fairly time-consuming job, since everything has to be recorded in real time, as the tape plays back. No shortcuts here. But things are coming along pretty decently. So far, nearly half of the cassettes have been digitized, and about a third burnt to DVD. Well. Now we need some folks to transcribe a few of the interviews that never were transcribed before! Can you use a computer? Can you type quickly and accurately? Send us an email! We'd love to hear from you.

George & Charlotte Gibson Day 2010

Last Saturday we celebrated the 124th anniversary of the Gibson family's arrival in Howe Sound, and it was a whopping success! Thanks to Super-Valu for the outstanding cake.


We had a great turnout - over eighty people, many of them, no doubt, attracted by the chance to meet George and Charlotte themselves.


The crowd was a mixture of longtime locals and newer arrivals. There were even a few descendants of George and Charlotte (the real ones) in attendance.


Curatorial Assistant Matt Cavers presented a slide show on the history of Gibsons. That's him pointing out the old flume at the mouth of Langdale Creek.


A good time was had by all! See you next year for the 125th anniversary!

Summer is creeping up on us!

May 11th already! - we apologize for our recent silence in the blogosphere. We're still here, in case you worried. In fact, we've been too busy to get to the computer.


What's new at the museum? Well, the first thing I should mention is that we're throwing a George and Charlotte Gibson Day open house, just like we do every year. George and Charlotte Day is an annual event commemorating the arrival of the Gibson family to West Howe Sound. It's now 124 years since they got here, over which time the town of Gibsons has grown from a small collection of houses and shacks by the forest's edge to a pretty modern place. We'll be celebrating the growth of our town with tea and cake, live music, a slide show presentation on the history of Gibsons, and - who knows - maybe an appearance by George and Charlotte themselves. The event is on Saturday, May 22, from 1:00 until 4:00. Send us an email (scm_a@dccnet.com) or give us a call (604-886-8232) if you have any questions!


As I type, museum board president and volunteer extraordinaire Jon Hird is building a display in our temporary exhibit space. The display celebrates the centennial of Canada's navy with a selection of maritime memorabilia from the SCMA's collection. It should be together by the end of this week, so come on by and have a look!

There are several big jobs ongoing right now. As I mentioned in our last post, we're working to organize and revitalize the museum's oral history program. Things are coming along with that - we're taking stock of what we have (and we have a lot) and getting ourselves organized to resume interviewing. We still need volunteers to assist with several jobs. We're looking for interviewers (must have good people skills, enjoy conversation, etc.) and transcribers (must be a quick typist and be able to spell accurately). If you're interested, please drop us a line!

That's it for now. See you in the museum!

The year is flying by...

April already! A quarter of 2010 has flown by and we here at the museum are having a hard time believing it. This sort of thing happens when you're busy, I guess, and we've been busy.

We had a very successful Antiques Roadshow on March 20th. Thanks to all of you who came out and supported the museum by having your treasures appraised. Hopefully there were lots of pleasant surprises - I did notice that there was a fellow on the front of The Local last week who'd had a painting valued in the tens of thousands. Amazing - and just think, it could be you next year!

In museum news, our Manager/Curator, Kimiko Hawkes, has just completed a course on the theory and practice of oral history, which was offered by the Archives Association of British Columbia. This is a great thing for the museum, as we have an enormous collection of oral history interviews that are in need of - well - they have various needs. Some cassette tapes need to be digitized. Some audio recordings need to be transcribed. Some transcripts need to be indexed. All of the records need to be properly catalogued. On top of that, we need to get out and interview people! There are countless people here who've lived long lives on the Sunshine Coast, and who have stories that ought to be recorded. Now that Kimiko has received training in this area, the museum is ready - almost - to get serious about the work of improving our oral history collection.

But we can't do it without volunteer support. Over the past few years, we've had a few dedicated volunteers help us with transcribing interviews and re-typing old interview transcripts that weren't preserved digitally. Hats off to them! Well, now we're looking to assemble a list of volunteers that can help out with:

-Transcription (must be able to type quickly and be able to spell competently)

-Interviewing (must enjoy talking and be willing to attend training - experience appreciated!)

-Other jobs (there will definitely be other jobs)

We'll also be looking for tips on who to interview. Do you know somebody who's been around the Sunshine Coast for a long time, and who remembers it as it used to be? Do you know anyone whose story ought to be told? Let us know. If you know anyone like this, or you're interested in joining our volunteer roster, contact Kimiko at scma_manager(at)dccnet(dot)com. (Substitute an @ sign for the (at) and a period for the (dot) - putting an email address out on the internet is an open invitation for junk mail!)

Thanks for reading! Drop by the museum sometime!