Technical Maintenance – It’s All Under Control

While the condition of our facilities is monitored on a daily basis to provide you with the best possible experience, each year the Centre closes for three weeks for maintenance. Many technicians travel to Villers-Bretonneux and assist our Operations Manager with works and repairs that could not be done if the Centre was open to the public.

This is a very exciting time for the entire team. If you ask our Operations Manager what this annual maintenance means to him, he will reply with humour, “many sleepless nights”. On a more serious note, here are a few words from the Operations Manager about the annual maintenance, “it’s a time when we take care of difficult work that we can’t normally take care of. The shutdown allows us to work with specialists to ensure that the vital parts of the museum are functioning properly. It is also an opportunity to better understand how the Centre works. It is a very intense and rewarding time for the technical team and necessary for the good of the equipment, for example to change faulty cables or screens.”

Here’s a look at the Sir John Monash Centre’s annual maintenance in numbers:

• 11 44′ LCD screens have been replaced throughout the interpretive gallery, primarily due to dead pixels.
• 1 84′ LCD touch screen replaced.
• 2 projectors connected to the touch tables (designed to pay a tribute to an Australian soldier or an Australian nurse from the First World War) were repaired.
• 186 screens in the immersive gallery and 17 screens in the interpretive gallery were re-calibrated, to ensure optimal colour rendering.
• 22 cables were changed.
• 3 servers used to broadcast the audiovisual content of the exhibition have been changed.
• 80 smartphones were updated to be compatible with the Centre’s Wi-Fi coverage. These smartphones host the SJMC mobile app, a virtual guide to the Sir John Monash Centre.

We look forward to welcoming you back to the Sir John Monash Centre as soon as the situation allows. History awaits!