California Association of Museums Green Museums Initiative

My friends at the Computer History Museum pointed me at the page from CAM about their Green Museums Initiative. Many SIA members have associations with museums. As folks concerned about preserving our industrial past, we should also show concern about our future, and getting your favorite museum to be more green is a great project. I'm on the GreenStep team at CHM, and it's been very interesting to see the impact of even simple steps.

Go GREEN!

jay

1956

There is an odd temporal coincidence that I hit while working on SIA 2008, but haven't written about. It's the year 1956 that ties together several different threads from SIA 2008. (No, don't bother calling Scully...)

In 1956, Fairchild Semiconductor was founded by former employees of Schockley Semiconductor who balked at William Schockley's management. (He called them "The Traitorous Eight", which stuck, they were amused...) A huge chunk of the semiconductor industry was founded by "Fairchildren", folks who had worked at Fairchild and went on to start their own companies. We drove by several of them, and stopped at the Intel museum.

In 1956 IBM shipped the first disk drive, invented by Rey Johnson and a team of researchers at 99 Notre Dame in San Jose. The Computer History Museum has one of these RAMAC disk drives in a restoration shop. Many of the SIA 2008 tours departed on paths close to 99 Notre Dame, and the site was a Treasure Hunt stop.

In 1956 Malcom McLean converted a WWII T2 Tanker into the first container ship. I don't know where that ship, recristened the IDEAL-X, was built, but T2's were built at Bay Area shipyards like the Kaiser complex in Richmond. Container ships now dominate shipping. Our visit to the Port of Oakland put folks right next to the Hanjin Lines container port.

If only I could find a 1956 connection for the Over the Hill tour!

jay

Adaptive Reuse in Istanbul - SantralIstanbul

I was chatting with Computer History Museum Registrar Allison Akbay, at her going away celebration about her recent trip to Istanbul (her husband is Turkish, so they visit there).  She told me about an interesting adaptive reuse project for an early coal fired power plant that has been transformed into an energy museum.  This is part of a much larger adaptive reuse project that includes the relocation of Bilgi University to the site. Dunno when I'll get to that part of the world, but if anybody is traveling there, sounds worth a stop. (She said it's "an adventure" to get there on public transit. The site is so new it doesn't show up on most maps.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silahtara%C4%9Fa_Power_Station

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SantralIstanbul

THAT'S How to Do IT!

SIA President Mary Habstritt gave me a pointer to the Save Brooklyn's Industrial Heritage web site. (Full disclosure, she had done some consulting to the sponsoring organization.)

This, IMHO, is what ANY serious industrial heritage preservation effort needs. A rich visual environment mixing current and historical images, an interactive map (as a map afficianado it's interesting that I don't recognize the vendor, it doesn't look like either Google or Yahoo!), and good historical detail. I'd argue that it needs some way for folks to join in, and help build a community. How 'bout creating a Flickr tag/group so folks could contribute their own images and ideas to this worthwhile effort? What other ways could they use to engage folks??

Compelling web sites are just another tool and don't replace more conventional forms of advocacy, but certainly can extend the reach of our passions for industrial heritage preservation. This is a good one to use for ideas about YOUR site (deliberately ambiguous...)!

jay