By Bronwyn Phillips During this last semester, my Practicum
placement has involved working at the Unley Museum which is
housed in the historic old Fire Station in Edmund Street Unley.
The task I am researching and will eventually complete is to
design a ‘statement of significance’, with the assistance and
direction of Dr Elizabeth Hartnell. A ‘statement of
significance’ can be for one object or a whole collection. It
can be just a few sentences or half a page long. The Unley
Museum needs two statements of significance, one for the
collection as a whole and the other one is specifically for the
extensive photographic collection. In order to develop two
‘statements of significance’ for the Unley Museum, a number of
tasks need to be completed. The ‘significance’ of an object or a
collection is very important since if a Museum does not know why
and what they are collecting it could lose direction. A
collection’s ‘significance’ involves a process of scanning the
whole collection and assessing its history, doing so