FedUni Curator wins community heritage award
Congratulations to Federation University Curator, Arts & Historical Collections, Clare Gervasoni, on winning the Martin Hallett Award for individual contribution to community heritage in the 2021 Australian Museums and Galleries Association Victoria Awards!
Clare is a longstanding and leading user of Victorian Collections since it began in 2010. A leader in her region, she has enabled lots of skill transfer to volunteers and believes strongly in the digitisation of material as a preservation and interpretation tool. She has instigated cataloguing and best practice in many Victorian collections, including work with the Federation University Art and Historical Collections to catalogue on the system, as well as cataloguing for Ballarat Heritage Services. Clare has been a clear and vocal advocate for small and regional community organisations that use Victorian Collections to decision makers. The judges commended Clare on her Victoria Collections cataloguing practices, her involvement in training individual and groups in digitisation, and sharing outcomes on a range of platforms, from Facebook groups to wikis, exhibitions to digital stories. “Clare is the consummate champion of preserving and making accessible grass roots community collections using Victorian Collections”.
Clare says, 'The Federation University Art and Historical Collections are held in the Geoffrey Blainey Research Centre at our Mount Helen campus. We have made our collections available online since the Victorian Collections Content Management System pilot project around eleven years ago. Since that time we have won the Victorian Collections Cataloguing Award twice, and have been nominated in the awards every year. Users can undertake keyword searches to discover many aspects of our history and collection, including names, subjects, themes, and former names of our institutions. Maybe you feature in the collection!'
Many alumni researchers have already have found our Ballarat and District Industrial Heritage wiki. Created in 2010 to celebrate our 140th anniversary it now boasts over 31 million views since its instigation. The wiki includes a multitude of information on the Ballarat School of Mines, including lists and information on staff, Associates, students and subjects. The wiki can be edited by the public, with full referencing is encouraged.
You can access all the online collections offered by the Geoffrey Blainey Research Centre at www.federation.edu.au/curator . With around 10,000 items uploaded to Victorian it should be remembered that 2/3s of the collection is still to be uploaded. The curator and a group of dedicated volunteers are happy to received requests for further information on what is held in the collection, and prioritise items that are identified as having research potential. You can contact Curator Clare Gervasoni on 03 5327 9168 or by emailing c.gervasoni@federation.edu.au