Visiting Donald

I'm away at the minute, travelling on family business, which has taken me to Donald in western Victoria. I've been through Donald before with my Auntie Dot, who was born there in 1918, but this time I found the Archives Centre, and it was open.

I am in total error for not photographing inside, and the one above is from a previous visit. And I am not totally sure of the title of the organisation, so I hope they will excuse me if I refer to them as Donald Historical Society.

The Society administers four sites - most of us are pretty pushed with one. There is the Police Camp, above, which is on the main highway, the Court House (which contains objects), which I have not yet been inside, an Agricultural Museum (under cover in a shed at the showgrounds, viewable through mesh from a main road), and the Archives Centre in a shopfront near the Court House. (Just up the road is a Lions Train Museum that looks pretty impressive too.)

Heaps of work obviously happening everywhere.

In the short time I was in the Archives, my Auntie Dot had a ball with all the references to her family in the Donald paper, which is being extremely well-indexed. We found a couple of photographs of her father and brother in the photograph collection, and we bought a book from the extensive range available.

It was very impressive - never before have I come across an "Accessions Room" - I would dearly have liked to talk more about that.

The Society is cataloguing artefacts to paper, based on the first edition of the Victorian Cataloguing Manual, but is not using InMagic. Their newspaper index is on a Windows program (my brain has refused to retain the name, but it seems to serve them quite well), and photographs are found most efficiently using a card system.

We have left a deferred query with the Society, and Auntie Dot is looking forward to reading all the family information that is in the newspapers. I'm looking forward to getting back there one day with some time to spare, to check out everything else. You learn so much when you look at how others are managing their collections. And managing very well this lot are - we were told that the team is often there in the Archives many days a week. That's good, as I reckon I will need a week next time to just see exactly what they are up to.