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technology
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museum
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Mallala
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wiki
Mallala Museum’s impressive display of local history has been boosted with the museum set to pilot a national wiki technology project which will allow the world to share the museum’s heritage and historical collections in an Australian first.
The museum committee has been busily improving and upgrading the museum in recent years, and is now the first in Australia to use the new wiki technology to record, preserve and share the town’s heritage and collections online.
The program works in a similar way to Wikipedia, where multiple users are able to contribute to the website to allow a collaborative approach to compiling and improving the knowledge of local history.
The wiki technology will allow people from across the world to access and contribute to local history by the end of this year, whether it be through words, photographs, or other visual information.
The initiative is led by the Collections Council of Australia, who last week visited the museum to begin the lap top and broadband link purchased through the $40,000 project.
Collections Council chief executive officer, Margaret Birtley, and project officer Darren Peacock met with committee members last Wednesday, along with Alexis Tindall, also of Collections Council of Australia.
“Mallala was selected to pilot this groundbreaking program because it has nothing online about its collections,” Ms Birtley said.
“The town has an interesting past, particularly because it was a base for training the Royal Australian Air Force from 1939 to 1960.
“We hope that by placing online information about the town and its collections, many of the men and women based in Mallala during that time will use the wiki to share their own stories - and help build up a more substantial understanding of the town’s past.”
The museum already has several impressive displays, ranging from family history to historic school photographs, wedding gowns, air force information, and soldiers from the local district.
The wiki project is funded through the AuDa Foundation and the Collections Council of Australia. The six-month project aims to demonstrate how wikis can provide a low-cost sustainable way of increasing knowledge, interest and participation in the preservation of heritage collections.
PICTURED: CELEBRATING a new era at Mallala museum from the blacksmith’s display are (from left) Alexis Tindall, Margaret Tiller, Mark Wasley, Marcus Strudwicke, Darren Peacock, Margaret Birtley and Gwenda Griffiths.
