Put Your Records On

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.

Better Together, Part 2

Once again, I love that the various parts of my life sometimes intersect in amazing and helpful ways.

Last week I managed to take a long stroll through the American art galleries while at work. I am ashamed to admit how infrequently I am able to visit the gallery spaces in my own museum. Because I had not visited the American art wing for such a long time, I had forgotten just how many pieces of furniture the museum owns. Not only are the pieces beautiful in their own right, but they also helped me with the collections inventory work I mentioned in an earlier post. Based on what I saw, I was able to confirm some of the identifications and date ranges I had placed on the objects with which I was working. Receiving confirmation of one's suspicions about an object can be uplifting and I will admit that I enjoyed the boost to my self esteem.

I often wonder if other museum employees neglect to visit their own museum's gallery spaces. I find myself putting the visits of for tomorrow because the galleries aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Perhaps I will make it my goal for the second half of 2011 to spend more time inside the galleries. The stuff inside them is, after all, what made me want to work in museums in the first place.

Better Together

I love when the various areas of my life intersect in unexpected and exciting ways.

First, a note on my prolonged absence from the blog. Following a health issue that took me out of commission for several weeks, I started an internship at a local historic house. I spend my days off cataloging all sorts of furniture, glass and paintings in an attempt to complete the first-ever inventory of this particular organization's collections. The emphasis in this project has been on getting the basics down on paper: a description of the object; its dimensions; and its location within the house. More in-depth analysis and research will be done later, once the full inventory has been completed.

This relatively new area of my life collided with my "real life" last weekend on a visit to Pittsburgh. I, along with my boyfriend and best friend, visited the Heinz History Center (which you should definitely check out on your next stop in the Steel City).



We strolled through a fascinating exhibition entitled Shattering Notions, which described in detail the importance of glass manufacture to the Pittsburgh region. As I studied some of the objects in the exhibition I realized that I had seen them before--when I cataloged them.

I nearly squealed with delight in the middle of the exhibition. The historic house at which I am interning has no curatorial files whatsoever. We know next to nothing about the objects in the collection or from where they may have come. And, as previously mentioned, our focus is entirely on other areas at the moment. I was naturally excited to be able to match an object to a label on a wall and take back a few valuable pieces of information. We can now correctly date several objects, as well as accurately report their manufacturer, which will eventually lead to new avenues of research.

This episode, for me at least, represents more than a strange coincidence on a weekend away or the ability to fill in gaps of knowledge for a wonderful historic house. My encounter with a piece of Pittsburgh pressed glass reminded me of something that I love about objects--they can connect us to another time and place. Just like hearing your favorite song from fifteen years ago can transport you back to the first time you heard it, seeing an object that used to belong to a grandparent can make you relive the moments you spent with them.

As museums reconsider the role that objects should play, we need to remind ourselves of the power that objects can have when used and interpreted effectively. As Stephen Conn states in his book Do Museums Still Need Objects?, objects lose relevance when "the objects cease to provide coherence to the ideas behind their collection and display, when the ideas themselves fail to coalesce into a coherent body of knowledge, and when other institutions position themselves better as producers and providers of information." When used as complements to fantastic ideas objects can help an visitor relate to an exhibition on a much deeper and more personal level than label text. Sometimes we just need a piece of pressed glass to remind us.