Cataloguing in a museum setting [was Re: nonsense...]

From: Richard Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 12:14 PM In article <CC28F43ED4708D489ABCF68D06D7F556040A5CCB89 at 505DENALI.corp.vnw.com>, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> writes: Just what it sounds like. :-) When an item comes into the collection, it is assigned an accession number; the standard is yyyy.nnn.mmm, where nnn represents order in which the item came in in year yyyy, and mmm is the individual number of each piece that makes up the item. If a piece is made up of parts (say a tea set, for example) a letter can be suffixed to the piece number for each part to make it possible to keep them associated even if physically apart. Leading zeroes should be used in the item and piece numbers. (The accession number should be written on the piece, leaving out the leading zeroes, whether on a tag or on an inconspicuous portion of the object itself . The latter is done using a water-soluble clear- drying compound to provide a marking surface--never write on the bare material of the object.) The accession number is recorded into a database such as Gallery Systems' The Museum System, along with provenance, condition, and any other relevant information that you wish to keep for each object. (We use Polaris, a library cataloguing system, because that was already in place when we began turning the private collection into a museum.) TMS is available to private collectors as well as to museums; I don't know the pricing, and it doesn't show up on their web site. There is a reference work on museum cataloguing published by the American Association of Museums, Buck & Gilmore's _The New Museum Registration Methods_, now in a brand new edition if I remember correctly. Museum folks are very helpful. Talk to the collections managers at a few museums local to you, to see what paperwork they use for incoming donations, and how they assign accession numbers, and what software they use for cataloguing. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.PDPplanet.org/ http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/