Documenting the Heritage of Nokia—From Discussions to Catalogue

Abstract

In 2015, the Museum of Technology received a donation of ninety data communication devices from the 1960s to 2010s, collected and arranged by employees of the Nokia Data Communications department. The museum has been organizing (2018⁻2019) documentation workshops to collect information and connect individual objects with larger concepts such as company history, innovations, and technologies. The idea is to gain comprehensive contextual information about the collection by bringing together expertise and experiences of (former) Nokia employees, and documentation and interpretation skills of museum professionals. The method of the documentation workshops is a conversational interview inspired by the objects. Subsequently, workshop discussions were planned to be digested and used in cataloguing individual objects and object groups by museum professionals. Eventually significance assessment was chosen as a tool for summarizing the documentation project. The paper discusses the planning and organizing of the outcomes of the documentation workshops and asks the following questions: What is the optimal relationship between cataloguing information in the collections management system and documentation of workshop discussions preserved in the museum’s collection archive? How should the workshop be documented to trace the provenance of the information? What information should and can be collected on the workshop participants?

Keywords

• documentation
• Nokia data communications collection
• significance assessment
• photo elicitation
• museum collections