handling artifacts, Summer school shows academics

Organized by the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the Reading Artifacts Summer Institute is a summer program for graduate students, post-doctoral students, academics and teachers.

The museum has organized the program for the past three years, according to Michel Labrecque, who assists with the program.

“We try to foster museum themes and give the participants a better understanding of what to do with artifacts,” Labrecque said.

The program lets the participants investigate the artifacts and look beyond the object and think about the history and the people who had a part in making it.

“It is about people making connections,” Labrecque said.

The week featured hands-on workshops, group artifact research, presentations and speeches by guest faculty and teaching students the basics when it comes to conservation and cataloging of an historically valuable objects.

“This week opens communications across the country and the world, it also allows scholars to make connections that will hopefully last a long time,” Labrecque said.

Fleming College professor Deb Scott teaches museum management and curatorship at the Peterborough, Ont.-based school and said she attend the program to better learn about preservation so she can take that knowledge back to her students.

“I wanted to learn more about the objects themselves and I have learned so much about the importance of the history behind an object and how an object can tell many stories,” Scott said, adding that she has found the week has opened her mind to look at objects in a much broader context.

She also said she didn’t expect to get quite so much hands-on experience.

Labrecque said in some ways, getting one’s hands a bit dirty is the best way to tell the story of an object. One of the sessions saw the students re-wiring a 1980s-era circuit board under the guidance of two former employees of the Ottawa-based Gandalf Technology.

Scott said they got to hear about the history company.

“We learned the background, which is so important,” Scott said. “When you collect objects, you have to collect more, you have to collect their stories for the object to come to life, and it is important on a whole pile of levels. That is what museums should do, help people connect with objects.”