Others become more important in preparing an exhibition or publication. It is especially significant when surviving instruments have remained in the context of their institution of use. In this paper I am concerned with the background to the surviving collections of historic scientific instruments at Australia's oldest university. The University of Sydney has several residual collections of instruments in departments such as Physics and Psychology. A lot of information about what an instrument is and when it was made can be found out from the thing itself and the accumulated knowledge and experience of the curator.
Instruments often bear names which indicate the maker, the wholesaler or the retailer.
Instruments which bear a patentee's name and patent numbers offer a strong lead for detailed research. A Handlist of Scientific Instrument-Makers' Trade Catalogues was published in Britain a couple of years ago. This covered the period from 1600 to 1914, and was based on the holdings of more than 100 museums, libraries and other institutions in Britain, the United States and to a lesser extent continental Europe. Of the 1570 different catalogues listed, only a single copy was located for a shade over three quarters of them, 1186. So archivists who in the course of sorting and weeding scientific papers come across trade ephemera, catalogues, leaflets, bills and so on, should recognise that they may be unique even if not of obvious importance to the material with which they are associated.