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Abstract
In 2015, the Museum of Technology received a donation of ninety data communication devices from the 1960s to 2010s, collected and arranged by employees of the Nokia Data Communications department. The museum has been organizing (2018–2019) documentation workshops to collect information and connect individual objects with larger concepts such as company history, innovations, and technologies. The idea is to gain comprehensive contextual information about the collection by bringing together expertise and experiences of (former) Nokia employees, and documentation and interpretation skills of museum professionals. The method of the documentation workshops is a conversational interview inspired by the objects. Subsequently, workshop discussions were planned to be digested and used in cataloguing individual objects and object groups by museum professionals. Eventually significance assessment was chosen as a tool for summarizing the documentation project. The paper discusses the planning and organizing of the outcomes of the documentation workshops and asks the following questions: What is the optimal relationship between cataloguing information in the collections management system and documentation of workshop discussions preserved in the museum’s collection archive? How should the workshop be documented to trace the provenance of the information? What information should and can be collected on the workshop participants?
Highlights
In context of museum collections, “Heritage of Nokia” may evoke thoughts of collecting mobile phones
The paper discusses the planning and organizing of the outcomes of the documentation workshops and asks the following questions: What is the optimal relationship between cataloguing information in the collections management system and documentation of workshop discussions preserved in the museum’s collection archive? How should the workshop be documented to trace the provenance of the information? What information should and can be collected on the workshop participants?
Significance assessment turned out to be the key in the documentation project of the Nokia Data communications collection in three ways: (1) The outcomes of significance assessment form a distinct level of knowledge supplementing the cataloguing information; (2) Statement of Significance is a link between the workshop discussions and cataloguing information; and (3) publications on significance assessment [1,2] offered beneficial tools to create a functional yet adjustable framework for workshop discussions
Summary
In context of museum collections, “Heritage of Nokia” may evoke thoughts of collecting mobile phones. The devices at the Nokia Data Communications Collection of Museum of Technology are mostly modems. They have served out of sight, for example, in automated teller machines, decades before the landline modems became common in households providing the chance to “surf the web”. These devices have long been an indispensable part of telecommunications and from the perspective of a Finnish museum, they can be studied as a part of the story of Nokia companies. “Nokia Data Communications collection” of the Museum of Technology represents all eras of Nokia-related modems, including some models of DNWP. The assessment will continue until the spring of 2019; the Statement of Significance of the collection is not included in this paper
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