Canada Science and Technology Museum

I spent most of this afternoon at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, helping the Library and Archives photograph conservator Tania to do condition checks on the installed Karsh photographs.  (See Intern on Loan).  Canadian museums really do have the most impressive names.

The grounds are quite extensive.  With intriguing decorative elements like locomotives, lighthouses, and a rocket.

Spring Lilacs

There is a giant lilac shrub behind my house.  I've been snipping a few little branches every four days or so, plopping them in this elegant beer glass (found rummaging in the CanadaHouse kitchen cupboards), and then carting them around the house with me.  Everywhere I go.  So that I can get as much enjoyment out of them as possible.

Art Show Jury

It's the time of year when Michael and I decide which art works we are going to enter into the hometown July 4th Art Show.  Big monetary prizes.  Like $30 for a blue ribbon.  

Ideally my entries would really shake up the local art scene (mainly watercolors of firetrucks, photographs of deer, that sort of thing).  However, Michael and I are always battling for the number one prize.  His entries are going to be impossible to beat: babies, pregnant Lea on July 4th - they'll eat it up.  I need to at least hold my own.

So... flip on back through the blog and decide which photographs you think are the most awesome.  Then give me a nice, short but solid description in the comments and maybe a why you like it.  Tell your friends to help me out too.  The more the merrier.    

In other news:

Is this not the most terrifying incarnation of Winnie-the-Pooh ever?

This nightmare was brought to you by the Brockway Old Fashioned Fourth of July Celebration, 2008.  You're welcome.

Lake Ontario

Morning:

Evening:

Welland Canal

The Saint Catharines Museum, as mentioned previously, is situated along Lock 3 of the Welland Canal.

Everyone needed a way to get their ships through the Great Lakes, and the Welland Canal solves the problem of traveling between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie without having to go over Niagara Falls.  Which is something, as you may imagine, that provides a slight barrier to a variety of ships.  Or barrels.  Whichever.

Another difficulty of taking a ship or whatever from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie or vice-versa is the change in elevation that is required: Lake Erie (and the rest of the Great Lakes) being at a much higher elevation.  Hence the necessity for multiple locks.

There is an observation platform constructed specifically so that visitors can watch as ships pass through the lock.  Supervisor Greg specifically requested that we pause from workshopping so that he, Dorothy, and I could watch the lock in action.

We also had to watch one of the big up-and-down bridges go up-and-down.  Supervisor Greg was like a little boy.  Up-and-down bridge!  So exciting!

We had a good laugh at this warning sign.

"Proud V."  I'm not the only one who picked that up from Hye-Sung.

I'm supposed to send this one home to my mum.

At the time this photo was taken, these were being seriously considered as a purchase.  Moosenoculars.

The St. Catharines Standard: Some TLC for Standard Photo Negatives

Don Fraser, Standard Staff (with slight modifications by me) link here.

The negatives are priceless vignettes of local life from the late 1950s.  One standout shows then Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson grinning at a St. Catharines Legion hall reception.  It's also one of the more damaged of the 600,000 negatives in The Standard collection donated to the St. Catharines Museum in 2007.  The image is crinkly and bubbly, the features of Pearson barely recognizable.

On Thursday, the Canadian Conservation Institute began working on about 200 of the images in need of major restoration.  For the federal government institute, it's the first Ontario site visit doing this kind of work on photo collections.

"This particular batch is an important part of The Standard collection for the museum," said Supervisor Greg, a conservator for the institute. "And it's starting to deteriorate in a significant way.  "It could have been storage conditions, it could have been the manufacturer or a combination of issues. But they're in serious need of work."

Inside a museum basement room, Supervisor Greg and Intern Jessica showed how it's done: a delicate process of separating the negative's silver gelatin emulsion (or image layer) from a deteriorating plastic film base.  After the negative is put in water, a solvent bath dissolves the glue holding the layers together and the gelatin emulsion sloughs off.  That remaining image layer is then scanned, put in a special archival sleeve and stored.  One person can do about three or four images in an hour.  With the help of a $4,000 Niagara Community Foundation grant, private conservator Dorothy McC- will also be helping with the negative treatments.

Museum curator Arden P- described this work as "critical."  "We don't have the financial resources and expertise to be able to do all this in-house," P- said. "These things are dying as we speak and it's so critical to get them treated and scanned.  "It's a long, involved process that can only be done by hand."  The museum and its volunteers have already completed two years of what is anticipated to be a 25-year project of preserving and archiving The Standard's photo collection.

And the accompanying photograph.  This was really nerve-wracking: photographer and reporter and me doing this (which is, like all things, way more difficult that it sounds).  And, to top it off, the negative reacted totally differently than the one Supervisor Greg did the day before.  And in a totally unexpected way too.  But it was okay.

Lake Ontario Workshop Holiday Bonanza

So the ThinkTank has sent Supervisor Greg and I off to Saint Catharines Museum (in Saint Catharines, Ontario) to do a several day workshop with the museum staff about negatives.

Apart from all of the preparation we did back in Ottawa and the actual workshop-giving here in Saint Catharines, its like a mini-holiday - Lake Ontario is fab, the days are sunny, and we got ice cream cones today!  Weee!