Heritage Play Day

Hello everyone - our apologies for the lag between postings! It's been a busy January, and it promises to be a busy February as well.

In case you haven't heard, we're planning to have our annual Heritage Play Day on February 20th this year. From 1:00 until 4:00, people of all ages are invited to come down to the museum for an old-fashioned good time! It'll be fun for the whole family. We'll be pulling out some tables and some crafting supplies, and providing some professional-quality coaching on origami, whirligigs, and other crafts. You can also check out a photo display on old-time sports and recreation on the Sunshine Coast that we're putting together in celebration of BC Heritage Week, which runs from February 15th to the 21st. This year's Heritage Week theme, not surprisingly as the Olympics draw near, is sports and recreation.

Putting together the photo display reminds me what a spectacular resource our photo collection is. A historic photograph is a powerful thing - it shows you something that can be both familiar and jarringly different. Take the photograph of Gibson's Landing behind the title of this blog as an example! We're hoping to make good use of our photo collection in our revitalized upstairs exhibits this year, so stay tuned. We're also hoping to make photo prints available for sale in our gift shop very soon.

So long for now! Hope to see you at Heritage Play Day! Or, if you can't make it then (or would rather miss out on making crafts), any other time between 10:30 and 4:30, Tuesday through Saturday!

What we did over our Christmas vacation.

Hello history fans! Happy 2010 to all of you! First of all, we're sorry that we let so much time go by between the first post and this one. We'll try to be more punctual in the future! Anyway - we started this blog to keep you posted on what we're doing around here at the Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives. As it turns out, we've been really busy lately, and (we like to think) it shows. We were closed to the public from December 19th to January 5th, and over that time, we gutted and renovated our office. And boy, oh, boy, is it ever different in here now. Better. Much better. Way better.

There's lots of work to do in this little museum (which we'll tell you about on this blog, by and by), and some might wonder why we chose to re-do the office rather than, say, any one of the exhibits that we've been meaning to get to. Well, the thing about an office is that it's where the museum staffers spend ninety percent or more of their time. It's the place where most of our work gets done - research, writing, collections management, admin. And our office, pre-2010, had some fundamental flaws. Well, flaws might be too strong a word. It's just that, for instance, only one of us had a desk. Curatorial Assistant Matt Cavers and Graphics Technician Gary Morrison had been hitting their knees on drawers underneath their makeshift computer terminals for years. And then there was the clutter. Most offices experience some degree of entropy, but our office was messy, even at its cleanest. So the office, in a way, was the top priority - a messy office makes it hard to do good work.

These are the "before" pictures. Picture trying to get work done in there! Impossible! (OK, that might be a bit hyperbolic, but you get the idea.)

So over the break, Manager-Curator Kimiko Hawkes, Exhibit Technician Jon Hird, and the aforementioned Curatorial Assistant (I've now, by the way, subtly introduced you to most of the museum team) set to work putting things in boxes, disassembling furniture, moving heavy objects out of the office, vacuuming up yesteryear's cobwebs, sanding, spackling, painting, assembling furniture, and putting together a brand new office, in which everyone has a desk. The results are remarkable. There's floor space. We don't have to squeeze past one another to get to the photocopier/printer/scanner/fridge/door. Things have places. It's a harmonious work space, finally. It's dreamy.

Those, of course, are the "after" pictures.

So now it's back to work for 2010, in a brand new office. This promises to be an exciting year - we have exhibits to redesign, Museum School programs to run, and a long-anticipated new museum software system to install. Looking forward to telling you all about it! In the meantime, we wish you a very happy and successful new year. So long!