22 Oct
2010
22 Oct
'10
1:17 p.m.
> 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.
What do you mean by
'item','piece' and 'part' here? I can understand an=20
item being made of several pieces, but why do you need a third level here=
?
I was trying not to re-use the same word for different levels. In the case of
a classic computer, what would you label? The casing? The=
=20
individual PCBs/modules? How would you handle the
case of taking 2=20
effectively identical machines acquired at differnet times and using=20
parts from bvth to make one working example, or would a museum never do=20
that? (If the latter, then I consider the policy to be broken!).
I'll start with the last comment. The policy will depend on the purpose
of the museum; no two museums have identical missions, though they may be
very close. A computer museum with a mission of making systems run will
have a very different answer to your question than a museum dealing with
the history of engineering laboratories, where the identical computers
may have been used for very different purposes and be important to the
understanding of how each lab achieved its goals. (Not every museum tries We catalog the top-level items (CPU, disk drives, tape
drives, printers,
etc.) when they come in. The low-level items (disk packs and cartridges,
tapes, boards, etc.) are fuzzier: Loose items, like spare boards, are
catalogued when they come in, but boards installed in larger items only
get catalogued when they are pulled for repair or replacement.
Hmm.. I don't think I am terribly happy about that. I would want to open
up every machine as it was being catalogued and recurd all the intenral
PCBs, what options are installed, and so on.
-tony