About the collection
The majority of the physical objects and Splinters documentary video represented are drawn from the David Branson Papers HMSS 0233 held at the ACT Heritage Library. It consists of business files, scripts, posters, press cuttings, video and audio tapes and other ephemera collected by the late David Branson. It was arranged and described in 2010 by Joel Swadling and together we facilitated its donation by David's mother Margaret Hunt to the ACT Heritage Library. Further additions to HMSS 0223 were made over time through donations by David's partner Louise Morris, Jose Robertson, Patrick Troy, Stuart Vaskess and Pauline Cady.
An ACT Heritage Grant was secured in 2011 to digitise the 81 video cassettes in the original donation. The video cassettes were cleaned and digitised to archival standards by Damsmart! in Canberra using a SAMMA unit , which output an archival JPEG200 file, a DV25 file and a WMV file for each cassette, as well as XML files of process metadata. The ACT Heritage Library did not have facilities to archivally store digital media, so arrangements were made to upload the files to the ANU Data Commons. The DV25 format became obsolete during the course of the research and therefore these working files were transcoded to the H.264 format, which had become the standard for online video streaming. Video cassettes subsequently donated were digitised by Craig Brown to MPEG-2 format on DVD-ROM and then transcoded these to H.264 MPEG-4 files which were also uploaded to the Data Commons.
In 2012, the opportunity of creating a Splinters exhibition arose. I sought the assistance of early Splinters member Jose Robertson, a curator with experience in digital collections. In preparation we photographed most of the visual materials in the collection, such as posters and notebooks. These photos were taken quickly as an aide memoire with no intent to display them. In the absence of further resources, however, these photos have been used here: hence the occasional instrusion of a hand in some of the photos.
Since the creation of HMSS 0233, digital video and photos, texts, correspondence and other items documenting the Splinters exhibition and various events produced were added. These have been stored on a number of platforms, including Wordpress, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. Concurrently I have collected other records of Splinters available online.
Link to the David Branson Papers HMSS0233 landing page at the ACT Heritage Library website.