26 Oct
2010
26 Oct
'10
10:27 a.m.
I'm getting into this a bit late (I was travelling last week), but I have a few
comments, based on 18 years of working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Ah no, you misnderstood me...
Presumanbly there is a database of the artefacts in the museum, indexed
by the indentification numbers. That database includes more details about
the particular object, ?things like (I would hope), options, serial
number (s), version, etc. All we've been discussing. I see no reason why
the date of acquisition (full date, not just the year), source (maybe
'anonymous donor' :-)), and the like should not be stored there as well.
It's far better to store too much information than too little.
But what I am wondering is why the year of acquisition should be a field
in the indentifier.
The Anthropology collections at FMNH were numbered sequentially, which was a bit of a PIA.
Having looked in the catalog ledger books, I might know that artifact 186276 is a Nazca
pot collected by Alfred Kroeber in 1927, but is 186277 from the same collecting field trip
or is it something from Tibet? Having a number like 1927.23.49 for that pot would make it
easier to find associated artifacts.
For my field work, I used RegionSite-Feature.artifact, such as M10-5.26. In the end,
though, any cataloging system is arbitrary.
<snip>
Message: 4
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 19:22:50 +0100 (BST)
From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
Subject: Re: Cataloguing in a museum setting [was Re: nonsense...]
There could be an arbitrary limit because that is what some database programmer decided
was sufficient when the collections program was written (cf. Y2K).
On Sat, 23 Oct 2010, Tony Duell wrote:
That's _exactly_ my point. Having atbitrary limits may cause problems
later on.
Sure, but that's then 4 levels. I ahve no
problem extending the
heirarchical system to as many levels as are necessary, my query is why
it's noramlly limitied to 3. Why not just have as many levels as are needed.
A properly designed system should be extensible to as many levels as are
needed. And why recorsd the year of acquisition? What
importance is that? Why not
just a number for each artefact starting at 1?
It is unlikely that you nor I would care much about the year of
acquisition. ?But the bean-counters care.
-tony
I would also second the comment (Fred's?) that cataloging needs to be done by someone
with knowledge of the material being cataloged.
As to cataloging individual boards within a computer, we did not have a comparable
situation -- the FMNH's artifacts are usually single items. Where there were, for
example, multiple panels in a carved wall, the panels could be numbered 98123.1, 98123.2,
etc. The question that has been raised in regards to computers is, where do you stop
dividing the artifact??Again, the decision is somewhat arbitrary. The boards might not be
numbered, but presumably there is a description of the computer on record?that lists its
major components.
Bob