Working from home as a Legacy Collection Registrar

By Jane Manallack, Collection Manager, Society and Technology

Working as a Legacy Collection Registrar from my lounge room is a unique and challenging experience. How do you register and document thousands of photographic negatives without actually seeing them?

I’m currently working with a collection of images of the operations, advertising, equipment production and daily working lives of the staff and management at the International Harvester Company in the 1950s.

Working through thousands of ledger entries, I can’t help but consider the staff tasked with documenting this collection of images. As I decipher their various handwritten entries, I imagine these anonymous clerks through their writing. There’s the clerk who writes in clear capitals (thank you – so easy to read), the clerk who scrawls their entries and writes G the same way they write S (sigh).

I’ve grown dependent on their visual clues, when someone’s been thoughtful enough to leave behind a crumb of such information. There’s the extremely descriptive clerk who prods me to imagine a ‘lonely cow in paddock’. And there’s the concise and rather dull clerk who leaves nothing to the imagination with ‘AA-110’ – that’s a panel van in case you were wondering.

I’ve worked in the Museum industry for over 15 years as a Curator, Exhibitions Coordinator, Objects Conservator and for over seven years with Museums Victoria as a Collection Manager. My whole career has been a wonderful hands-on collections experience. Working as I do now, at home, I remind myself often how privileged I have been to handle and care for our state’s collection and look forward to the day we can return to the Collection Store and I can seek out these photographs and enrich the registration data with the information I can actually see within the image.

For now, that lonely cow exists in my imagination as a rather lovely cream colour, looking mournfully out across an empty paddock.