Yet another long delay between posts.
I promise I have not stayed away from museums and the like in the interim. On the contrary, I visited the National Aquarium and Historic Ships in Baltimore and the Valley Forge National Historic Park. I also started, with the help of some friends, an Emerging Museum Professionals Group in the Philadelphia area. And I have continued my collections internship at a historic house museum, kept working at my full time job, and started a graduate certificate program in Museum Collections Management and Care through George Washington University.
Whew! All of this activity has left me with very little time to think. However, I have, over the course of several months, made some very common sense realizations about things that do not always get noticed, despite their great importance.
Each session of my current course (Collections Management: Legal and Ethical Issues) focuses, unsurprisingly, on the legal issues affecting each area of collections management. Beginning with the role of the museum as a charitable organization and the duties of trustees, the course charts the legal and ethical duties of those caring for museum collections. What I have found most striking is the heavy reliance on accurate record keeping. Every single session comes back in one way or another to the quality and content of a museum's records. A museum's defense for everything, from charges of improper care to Nazi looted art or stolen property, relies on detailed and accurate record keeping.
I am not shocked by this. After all, collections managers are charged with keeping the best, most complete and most accurate records possible. In practice, however, the records for many museum objects are incomplete, missing or incorrect. Previous generations of museum staff simply did not keep records of the same type or quality now required by professional standards. Smaller organizations with untrained and unpaid staff may be ignorant of these standards in the first place.
Having had no formal instruction in this area, I had never fully realized the legal (not to mention ethical) ramifications of these deficiencies. The organization for which I am interning has no records of any kind. We are currently completing the very first inventory of the museum's collection. No accession paperwork exists. Many of the objects have no provenance whatsoever. Worse, the institution has no collection management policy establishing policies and procedures for record keeping.
The staff at the museum will soon start working on a comprehensive collection management policy. As we move forward with the policy and the (nearly complete) inventory, complete and accurate record keeping will play a central role in the process. Standards for creating and maintaining good record keeping will need to be established. I am appreciative of the timely reminder of the central importance of good record keeping and grateful for the opportunity to see the process enacted from start to finish.
