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Dear Prime Minister,
The latest word from the Canada Science and Technology Museum can’t look good from where you sit: Yet another federal building needs gazillions of dollars or it won’t be fit to use. It’s mouldy, and a temporary building at that. It’s like putting a new transmission in your 1994 minivan.
But there’s good news, sir. You already own a couple of other buildings piled high with science and tech stuff, on the same site, and offering a much better tour than the present building.
Bet your advisers didn’t mention that, did they?
I’ve visited and they are an eyeful, in the best sense. The museum site is 12 hectares, but the museum itself is little. It holds two per cent of the overall collection, and its last president compared it to a dollar store.
The secret is that the good stuff, called the Reserve Collection, is mostly in two humongous buildings out back. Can you imagine the National Gallery keeping 98 per cent of its art in a backroom? Neither can I, but it happens with artifacts of Canada’s technological past.
And it’s a fabulous past. You have a hidden gem there, Prime Minister, with every facet of technology from dentists’ chairs to Ski-Doo No. 1,000,001 to electrical equipment ancient and modern to cars and bikes and trains. (But not airplanes. They get their own museum, mould.) There’s a train that carried King George V and Queen Elizabeth in 1939. No one has to tell you the significance of that trip.
Why not let people in to see this history?
Experts will scoff at this because the storage buildings out back aren’t proper museums. They don’t have big bathrooms (admittedly, a challenge), or a gift shop. They don’t have flashing lights and interactive displays that let schoolchildren push a button. They don’t have educational messages all over.
But let’s look at what they do offer.
There’s one building for transportation alone. It has cars of all descriptions, bicycles, farm machines. Old Ottawa Transportation Commission streetcars (my favourite, on the off chance that you want to know, being the sweeper designed to sweep snow off the tracks more than a century ago. Lousy snow clearing machine, but good PR.)
How many places let you walk right past a rocket engine at eye level? Very cool.
There are generators, CT scanners, telephones, broadcasting gear, horse-drawn plows, computers, nuclear reactor parts, printing presses with movable type, surveying instruments, medical devices from the days when doctors brought a leather bag on house calls.
You can see a Cold War survival kit — bandages, penicillin and water purification tablets for life in a bomb shelter.
There’s a Simplex X-ray machine once used in shoe stores to fit children’s shoes (again, mostly a PR gimmick, but this time a radioactive one. Oops.)
Boats, like the Nahma, the last known Collingwood skiff, one of many fishing boat types designed by Canadians. We’re an ingenious people and it shows in this place, not in wars but in the way we have lived everyday lives, inventing along the way.
Should we let people look? Can’t be done, someone will tell you. Even if you put up barriers to keep visitors from touching the artifacts there will be all kinds of reasons why we can’t let the public in to see their own collection raw and unprocessed.
Except that it already happens. The museum hosts occasional tours through these storage buildings. Yes, they’re guided, but they could make part of the Reserve Collection accessible full-time. You’ll need some labels on the collection. If you can’t label it all, let visitors guess. It’s fun; I’ve tried.
It’s too dirty, experts will tell you. Not glitzy enough.
Good! And it’s not really dirty anyhow. Objects are scuffed up, but that’s because they have been used. Is the Franklin shipwreck cleaned up and surrounded by interactive displays?
I asked a guy who works there about the scruffiness of items a few years back. I still like his answer: “Science isn’t clean, so why clean it up?”
Once the people have seen what’s out back, Prime Minister, they’ll never go back to the Crazy Kitchen.
Respectfully submitted.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
The latest word from the Canada Science and Technology Museum can’t look good from where you sit: Yet another federal building needs gazillions of dollars or it won’t be fit to use. It’s mouldy, and a temporary building at that. It’s like putting a new transmission in your 1994 minivan.
But there’s good news, sir. You already own a couple of other buildings piled high with science and tech stuff, on the same site, and offering a much better tour than the present building.
Bet your advisers didn’t mention that, did they?
I’ve visited and they are an eyeful, in the best sense. The museum site is 12 hectares, but the museum itself is little. It holds two per cent of the overall collection, and its last president compared it to a dollar store.
The secret is that the good stuff, called the Reserve Collection, is mostly in two humongous buildings out back. Can you imagine the National Gallery keeping 98 per cent of its art in a backroom? Neither can I, but it happens with artifacts of Canada’s technological past.
And it’s a fabulous past. You have a hidden gem there, Prime Minister, with every facet of technology from dentists’ chairs to Ski-Doo No. 1,000,001 to electrical equipment ancient and modern to cars and bikes and trains. (But not airplanes. They get their own museum, mould.) There’s a train that carried King George V and Queen Elizabeth in 1939. No one has to tell you the significance of that trip.
Why not let people in to see this history?
Experts will scoff at this because the storage buildings out back aren’t proper museums. They don’t have big bathrooms (admittedly, a challenge), or a gift shop. They don’t have flashing lights and interactive displays that let schoolchildren push a button. They don’t have educational messages all over.
But let’s look at what they do offer.
There’s one building for transportation alone. It has cars of all descriptions, bicycles, farm machines. Old Ottawa Transportation Commission streetcars (my favourite, on the off chance that you want to know, being the sweeper designed to sweep snow off the tracks more than a century ago. Lousy snow clearing machine, but good PR.)
How many places let you walk right past a rocket engine at eye level? Very cool.
There are generators, CT scanners, telephones, broadcasting gear, horse-drawn plows, computers, nuclear reactor parts, printing presses with movable type, surveying instruments, medical devices from the days when doctors brought a leather bag on house calls.
You can see a Cold War survival kit — bandages, penicillin and water purification tablets for life in a bomb shelter.
There’s a Simplex X-ray machine once used in shoe stores to fit children’s shoes (again, mostly a PR gimmick, but this time a radioactive one. Oops.)
Boats, like the Nahma, the last known Collingwood skiff, one of many fishing boat types designed by Canadians. We’re an ingenious people and it shows in this place, not in wars but in the way we have lived everyday lives, inventing along the way.
Should we let people look? Can’t be done, someone will tell you. Even if you put up barriers to keep visitors from touching the artifacts there will be all kinds of reasons why we can’t let the public in to see their own collection raw and unprocessed.
Except that it already happens. The museum hosts occasional tours through these storage buildings. Yes, they’re guided, but they could make part of the Reserve Collection accessible full-time. You’ll need some labels on the collection. If you can’t label it all, let visitors guess. It’s fun; I’ve tried.
It’s too dirty, experts will tell you. Not glitzy enough.
Good! And it’s not really dirty anyhow. Objects are scuffed up, but that’s because they have been used. Is the Franklin shipwreck cleaned up and surrounded by interactive displays?
I asked a guy who works there about the scruffiness of items a few years back. I still like his answer: “Science isn’t clean, so why clean it up?”
Once the people have seen what’s out back, Prime Minister, they’ll never go back to the Crazy Kitchen.
Respectfully submitted.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
