Saturday, April 29, 2006
Sic transit gloria mundi
This semester I take a course about the different fields of work in a museum as part of my studies in History of Science and Technology. The course takes place at Berlin’s Deutsches Technikmuseum (German Museum of Technology), a really fine museum with a slight focus on transportation but always worth a visit.
Upon leaving the musem, I came across this dumpster filled with old lab equipment and computers. Lots of oscillo-whatevers with big knobs and heavy cases by German companies Siemens and Rohde und Schwarz.
In some way, this is a shame, especially when you were just given a talk about the preservation of technology going on in the musem. Sure, one must not forget that preserving something in an archival sense means first of all throwing away. You can easily fill up the biggest storage spaces with tons of stuff, but of course that becomes unaccessible quickly and is effectively the same as dumping it all in the first place.
So, letting go is definitely no sacrilege in attempts to preserve. But given the fact that museums generally are short of funding and there are enough people selling and buying weird stuff on ebay, I cannot understand why the museum opts for dumping unused stuff. They actually have to pay for the waste disposal of electronic equipment. So why not put all that in one of the unused storage building the museum definitely has and have a public sort-of garage sale once a month?
Unfortunately, I lent my car to a friend for the weekend so I couldn’t get anything of that stuff but an Atari 1040ST that is light enough to carry (it works, by the way). If you don’t mind committing theft; everything’s still there. Don’t cross your fingers anything in the dumpster could be still working, though: They clearly tossed it in there and it’s been raining today.
