Telecommunications equipment tells fascinating tales of innovation and culture. Teachers use this collection of items to ignite students’ intrinsic curiosity and foster an interest in engineering.
HBEC’s community-driven research approach is one of the hallmarks of its success, and this project illustrates how this method can be employed within pandemic situations.
Museum Exhibits
Our museum exhibits offer insight into technology, history, culture and people from many walks of life. With our large collection of telephones dating back from their initial use to contemporary models and equipment, come experience one of North America’s largest telephone museums!
Our exhibitions are enhanced by educational programs that educate visitors on the significance of nature. Students gain an appreciation of its value through a multi-sensory experience that includes touching, smelling and hearing about its treasures.
This groundbreaking app allows visitors to hunt for and collect plant and animal images from our William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings. Visitors can use the app to collect 69 images before using additional information about them once captured – creating an enjoyable interactive way for them to explore our exhibitions!
Museum Volunteers
The Museum Volunteers program is an engaging history program tailored specifically for your classroom, office, home or other group setting. Utilizing historic objects from our collections we can guide your students in developing observation and inference skills with object explorations, stories and activities from Ohio social studies standards as well as Common Core standards that can be delivered either remotely or physically.
Discover how Saratoga County residents celebrated holidays in the past through photographs and historical objects. Participants will discover traditions surrounding Christmas, Hanukkah, Halloween, Thanksgiving and other major holiday customs.
As part of its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, HBEC created a telephone outreach project in response to this pandemic to keep registry members engaged without physical events and programs. This initiative complements HBEC’s longstanding commitment to community engagement while still fulfilling their overall mission of supporting older adults and their caregivers across Texas.
Museum Archives
Telecommunication museums provide children and adults alike with an immersive history lesson of communication technology’s evolution from its original invention through today’s multifunctional smartphones. Museums preserve artifacts that illustrate its iterative design process while simultaneously stimulating visitors’ curiosity on how communication technology has profoundly transformed society.
Museum archivists are responsible for developing and upholding collections management policies that adhere to professional archival ethics and standards in their repositories. Where possible, they should adopt existing institutional policies and procedures as much as possible while when necessary creating tailor-made policies to fit their repository’s collecting scope.
Museum archivists should strive to collaborate with other manuscript collecting repositories when considering new acquisitions, in order to respect donor wishes regarding access restrictions and copyright. Furthermore, they will ensure their institutions can retain ownership of archival holdings while where applicable requesting that donors transfer copyright ownership through Deed of Gift documents.
Museum Collections
Telecommunication museums provide a tangible history of communication technology, offering visitors an easy way to understand its development in today’s interconnected world. By preserving rare models and prototypes, museum collections demonstrate how these processes shaped our connected lives.
This museum boasts operator switchboards and step-by-step automatic branch exchange systems as well as panel systems – an engaging destination for families, school field trips, and sightseeing tours of Edmonton. Its collection reveals how telecommunications have advanced since Alexander Bell first unveiled his phone in 1876 all the way up until mobile phones have taken their place as part of everyday life.
A museum’s governing authority serves as both a trustee and guardian of its assets, overseeing them for public use and respecting pluralism and diversity both inside the collection as well as among communities they serve. They must protect these assets as public resources while conducting all their activities for common benefit rather than private financial gain; museums that serve their local communities must find creative solutions to meet challenges presented to them by community service.
