A question of significance

ERIC ARCHER: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the afternoon session. This afternoon we will be talking about using significance to make collections management decisions, a subject very close to my heart. The Museum has done some quite interesting things which you will hear about over the next little while in relation to that subject.

The first speaker for this afternoon’s session is Roslyn Russell who I am sure needs no introduction. Roslyn is an historian, editor and museum curator, and her involvement with developing guidelines for assessing the significance of moveable cultural heritage goes right back to the 1990s when she was one of the co-authors of the first general guidelines to safeguarding documentary heritage. Ros is co-author with Kylie Winkworth of Significance (2001) and Significance 2.0 in 2009. She has been chair of the Assessment Sub-committee of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee since 2000, chaired the Register Sub-committee of the UNESCO Memory of the World international program for 2005-09 and is currently chair of the International Advisory Committee of the UNESCO Memory of the World program. So Ros comes highly experienced, highly qualified and very expert in her subject. Thanks very much, Ros.

ROSLYN RUSSELL: Thank you, Eric, for the introduction. I am assuming today that most people in this room will have a working acquaintance with the significance assessment process. I will do a couple of quick reminders but I want to talk more about a couple of the criteria and the guidelines that come off them today in relation to conservation and some new thinking I have had recently about how these can be applied. There is the definition of significance for you:

All this will be very familiar to many people here in the room today. A key rationale for the development of a significance assessment methodology for museum objects was its potential to improve decision making in their conservation. Using an assessment of significance, expressed in a statement of significance that then guides all decision making about an object or collection, has become increasingly common across the museum sector in Australia over the past decade. The first edition of a guide to assessing significance was published by the Heritage Collections Council in 2001, as Eric said. Its development was guided by the Conservation and Preservation Working Group of the Heritage Collections Council, which included two conservators – Ian Cook from Artlab and Robyn Sloggett who is now at the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne.

At the time the first Significance guide was being developed, awareness of the need to preserve all significant aspects of an object’s fabric, especially those that related to critical aspects of its life story, was not nearly as advanced as it is now. This awareness, on the other hand, had led decision making in the built heritage community for some time where the practice of managing a site according to its significance was enshrined in the Burra Charter [The Australia ICOMOS charter for places of cultural significance].

There was a strong desire amongst those developing the Significance guidelines to caution against a too-rapid resort to the paint brush or to the welding kit by those working in museums who were itching to ‘do things up’. In this respect, a lot of the target audience for this publication was small and volunteer-run museums, and a lot of people there love the idea of having something bright and spanking new on the museum floor and can’t wait to get to it and do something to it. I recall visiting a regional museum, ironically during a workshop to discuss the projected Significance guidelines, and being shown a large room full of old printing machines from various periods. Each had been given a coat of matt black paint with the details picked out in gold. It was like entering a warehouse in a time warp – all signs of the working lives and relative ages of these machines had been obliterated.

The first version of Significance carried examples of objects where signs of working life were integral to their significance: a travelling cook’s galley for the Fife family’s chaff-cutting team in the 1930s and 1940s in the Riverina that showed evidence of passing through narrow spaces and along rough rural roads; and a World War I soldier’s uniform, marked by its use in muddy trenches under battle conditions and collected as its wearer came out of the line. A coat of paint or a thorough cleaning would have obliterated the aspects of the objects that told their stories. The message of the Significance guidelines published in 2001 was that an object in original condition was likely to have more significance than one that had been restored, particularly if extensive alterations had been made to its fabric.

Last year we published Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collections. This version reiterated the criteria and guidelines of the first version, but added an expanded applications section available online, as are both editions of Significance. It was also broadened to include other collecting domains outside museums like archives, libraries and so on. Significance 2.0 included a case study from this Museum in which a vehicle was conserved so as to retain significant aspects of its fabric that told the story of its working life. I will return to this shortly but, before I do, a quick reminder of the criteria by which significance is assessed [image shown]. We have four primary criteria: historic, artistic or aesthetic, scientific or research, social or spiritual. These are the primary criteria that determine why and how an item or collection is significant. Not all of them need to apply. An item or collection may be significant under only one criterion, and in social history museums often historical significance is the major criterion for assessing significance.

There are four comparative criteria: provenance, rarity or representativeness, condition or completeness, and interpretive capacity. These determine the degree of significance. Once you have assessed the primary significance, you then look at an object or collection to see how it stacks up against others of its kind – whether it’s rare, whether it’s representative, how complete it is, how much integrity the object has, and how it can be interpreted.

I want to focus on two of the criteria and discuss how they intersect when discussing significance in relation to a particular category of objects – those that function, which in practice generally means machines. The primary criterion I want to look at in this context is social or spiritual significance. This is the one we have most problems with. It is very hard in many contexts to get the idea of what this is about across to people. They see the word ‘social’ and they think social history – it is about society, the society of the times or whatever it might happen to be. We have to explain to people that this is actually historical significance generally speaking.

Social significance is different. It’s about a particular identified group of people who are attached to that particular object or collection. So demonstrating contemporary attachment – in the present, now – between the item in a collection and a group in the community is what determines social significance. It is quite a hard concept to get across. Those of you who have dealt with people trying to struggle with significance assessments often find they will bring this one up in the wrong situation. It’s a hard concept to get across. The best way to do it is by examples, as in everything.

The examples and case studies relating to this criterion in the Significance guides tend to emphasise its application to Indigenous objects. We understand the relationship between Indigenous communities and the objects that they hold dear. Secret and sacred objects of all faiths, icons, relics and that kind of thing – that is the kind of attachment that is quite easy to understand. But the justification is an identifiable link between the community and object.

Our colleagues in built heritage, where the idea of what they term ‘social value’ originated, have an easier task in demonstrating attachment to a place or a building. If it has social value, any attempts to interfere with it will provoke strong resistance – the shorthand for this is: threaten to push it down and see what happens, and the constituency that values it will arise and demonstrate an attachment to it. This is not the only test of course, but it is one way of finding out if a place has social value. How can we demonstrate social significance in the movable heritage sector and what other groups can we identify, apart from the ones I just mentioned, that demonstrate an attachment to objects? I’ll come back to this shortly.

Before that I want to discuss another one of the comparative criteria: condition and completeness. Many of you will recognise this object here [image shown]. Significance 2.0 has this to say in relation to the application of this criterion: