[vcf-midatlantic] Problems we face as collectors/curators: The last lesson of Bob Pease
Evan Koblentz
evan at vcfed.org
Mon Aug 26 23:14:59 EDT 2019
> Herb wrote:
>>> The last lesson of Bob Pease, may well be as suggested in the title
>>> of the article: "What is this stuff, anyhow?". What's to be done -
>>> if anything - with artifacts of technical work and products? Do they
>>> have value? What do they mean? Can they inform us, or simply amuse
>>> us, or do they just get in the way?
>>
> On 8/26/2019 4:01 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote:
>> This is why, when giving museum tours, I focus hard on explaining the
>> "so what" instead of technical specifications. Other than storage
>> (how many of these doodads are needed to make one modern memory
>> cards), most of our visitors couldn't care less about speed, memory,
>> or whatever else. They want to know what is this thing and why should
>> I care. If you don't make that point early, then you lose them.
>
> So Evan, what works for the visitors you describe?
It depends. I welcome them, ask if they've been here before, find out if
they're techies or normal people :), and size up the situation from
there. Sometimes I ask if they want a tour or if they just want to look
around. Other times I push into one choice or the other. Basically I try
to get a sense of who they are and what's the best way to
entertain+inform them. The hardest situation is when a group has one
engineer, one non-techie with mild interest, one teenage kid, and one
toddler ... how do you pick the best thing for all four of them? That
type of thing happens a lot.
One thing I * always * do is pick the youngest child or the uninterested
spouse and tell them their job is to make sure everyone else in their
party doesn't touch anything! It works great.
I could go into a lot more detail/examples, but it would be threadjacking.
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