Every profession has its own special language. When I tell people that I'm the Collections Manager/Archivist of Touchstones Nelson, people often look puzzled because they are unfamiliar with the terms. One woman didn't answer an email message because when she saw that I was the Collections Manager, she "knew she didn't owe us any money". So I thought that my first blog would be to explain what I do here at Touchstones Nelson: Museum of Art and History.
My job is actually two part-time jobs held by one person, me. The Collections Manager half of the position is to manage the museum artifacts owned by the Society which runs Touchstones, and the Archivist half of my job is to manage the archival and library items owned by the Society. Museum collections consist of individual natural or human history objects important because of their relationship to time, place, persons and events. In our collection, these artifacts include items important to Nelson and Area, everything from the tuba played by Jake Ludwig in Nelson's first City Band to a coin minted for Nelson's 1997 Centennial Celebration of Incorporation.
Archival collections are primarily one of a kind records of the activities of individual people, families, businesses, organizations, and governments. They include registration records of birth, death, marriages and of land and home transfers of ownership, as well as cartographic records such and maps and plans, audio-visual records such as artworks, photographs, films, videos, and recordings, and diaries, manuscripts, and correspondence, annual reports, and minute books. Our mandate includes collecting of all these different types of archival records but they must have a relevance to Nelson and area. For example we have photographs by Dick Spurway, James Allen, George Meeres and other local photographers in our archives.
Library collections are published items, such as books, magazines, newspapers, government documents, and reproduced video, audio and film. We have all these as resource materials, including a collection of books by local authors that began when our parent society,the Kootenay Museum Association, began in 1955.
Of course there are blurry lines between these three kinds of collections. Archives sometimes have objects, and Museums sometimes have archival records, and Libraries often have "special collections" which include both archival items and artifacts, but generally things fall easily into one of the three categories.
"Managing" all these collections includes working with the Board of Director's Collections Committee, volunteers and temporary staff to identify and acquire items, record and describe them, keep them safe, and provide information about and physical access to them for study and exhibitions,and in rare cases, pass them on to a new and more suitable home.It is a privilege to help to preserve the artifacts and archival items which witness to the history of Nelson and Area.
What else could you do with weathering plywood or pitted concrete? No video on this one, but she does have a website where you can view some images (link above), as well as appearing in numerous other blogs. I don't love all of her work equally, but where it succeeds, I think it's spectacular. Bye for now. 
