Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Noel Butlin and ANU Archives Tour July 2017

Maggie Shapley (ANU archivist) led the tour of the  ANU and Noel Butlin Archives  on 26 July 2017.  A small crowd of librarians and records managers turned up to explore the repository situated over the  Parkes Way Tunnel.  Maggie explained that  the Noel Butlin Archives centre had originally been designed as an underground carpark so it is not designed in its floor loadings to carry the heavy compactuses of  purpose built  Archives. The staff have done a  great job of storing the  various collections in archival  quality  storage boxes and  making do with the shelves they had .  Various numbering  systems has been  changed and started  by different archivists. Under Maggie a major achievement has been pulling of all these diverse systems into the one relational discovery system.


 Maggie and  Sarah Lethbridge the Senior Archivist had gone to some pains to  draw out  interesting items in their collections to  show  us on the tour and  we all enjoyed the show and tell. The Noel Butlin Archives is a mixture of company records and union records so many family historians  use the Noel Butlin Archives to find out about their ancestors involvement in   certain unions or  firms  as well as academic researchers doing formal research into  such organisations. The range of topics researched include industrial relations, immigration, working women, indigenous employment, architecture, economic history, family history, social history in Australia and the Pacific, and on particular industries such as agriculture, timber, shipping, mining, brewing, advertising and finance The ANU Archives holds corporate as well as personal papers of ANU academics. Several interesting collection items were  the   research and mapping of the many pubs in Sydney based on the Tooth company records and the  pamphlets and photos of the  spartan ANU campus and  sparse settlement of Canberra of the 1940s used  to market ANU  and to entice British academics to migrate to  Canberra. To me personally a very interesting  collection were the unions banners  used by various trade unions as part of their Mayday celebrations. I was  also intrigued to see the  very old  minute books of   one of Australian’s earliest trade unions ,  the stone masons of New South Wales. The  collection of old sporting trophies from the old forestry school reminded me of the stories my mother an old Canberra girl use to narrate.  Learning about how they physically   treat the collection by freezing  to  keep pests like silver fish out was another interesting aspect. It certainly beats reading about such things . The  physical process of digitising various  memorable papers and  other items in the collection was an eye opener for me.  Afterwards all of us remarked how much we had gained from going on the  tour and discovering for ourselves the ANU and Noel Butlin Archives.