I finally got my author’s copies of Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections and I was notified that there is a problem with ordering the book from Amazon:
This is a fun story that developed when brainstorming Egypt Calling with Paul. In his story, a huge statue of Ramses II disappears. In mine, things are far less dramatic. It is just that life is very confusing if you find yourself alive, standing on a plinth in a museum. Especially if you haven’t been alive before.
I will occasionally post a chapter here since I think we all need a bit of distraction every now and then. And perhaps it makes us sympathize with the artworks in our exhibitions – and everybody else in there.
Chapter 1 – Boring
Boring.
That was what it was.
Standing on a plinth in the middle of the room, being lit by colorful lights and looked at by people was just boring.
Image by Manon25s from Pixabay
It had taken him three times to realize it.
Three times of people leaving, the lights being switched off, the doors being locked, the doors being unlocked, the lights being switched on again, and the people coming back in.
But now, he knew it for sure:
This was boring.
Now the question was: what could he do about it?
He didn’t know much about himself. He knew that he was marble. The second kind of people said so.
As far as he had observed, there were three kinds of people:
There were those who came in and looked at him. Then, there were those who came in, barely looked at him, but then pointed with their fingers at him and told the looking kind of people stuff about him. And finally, there were those people who just stood or sat in a corner. They scowled at everybody and barked orders at the first kind of people.
Usually they shouted that people shouldn’t touch his butt.
Not that he minded that. At least people interacted with him. It was far better than just being stared at as if something was wrong with him.
Although…some of the looking kind of people not even really looked at him.
They turned their back on him and then, they held up small rectangle things that showed a small version of him and the faces of the people. People giggled when they did that. He didn’t understand what was funny about it.
People, in general, were very odd.
But he was digressing.
So, he was marble. He had no idea what that meant but it sounded good. Solid, somehow.
But what did it mean, being marble? Did it mean he couldn’t do anything but standing on a plinth in the middle of a room and being stared at?
From all he had seen when looking at himself on people’s little rectangle things, he looked a lot like people. Hands, feet, tummy, all was there. He was just larger.
8 feet.
That was what the pointing people always told the staring people. He looked at his right foot—which was easy to do since it was below him, directly in his line of sight—and did a rough estimate. If he imagined placing one foot in front of the other and doing that eight times… yes, yes, it could be that this was his height.
Wait.
Could he actually do that? Place one foot in front of the other?
For now, he had never tried to move.
Ever since he had become aware of himself—he didn’t know how many times the light had been turned off and on since then, but it had been a while—he just stood here and observed his surroundings. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he could actually move. Standing on a plinth just seemed like…the natural and decent thing to do.
But it was boring. He had established that. It was boring. And so, perhaps he should try something new?
Carefully he lifted the big toe of his right foot. It rose from the plinth without effort.
“Mom, Mom, the statue is wiggling its toe!” someone shouted.
It was one of those small people. Sometimes the big, staring people were accompanied by small versions of themselves. They were much more fun than the big ones. They ran around and laughed and touched things. And then the other, grim-looking people shouted at them and had serious words with some of the big people.
“Sure it did, dear. And now, come here, we want to see the installation in the next room,” a large one replied. Someone with long hair, a flowery dress, and an annoyed expression. Mom, he assumed.
“But, Mom! I saw it. Look!” The little person had come close.
He set his toe on the plinth again. It seemed it was at least something extraordinary to do and he didn’t want one of the grim-looking people come over and shout at him. He would try some more of this moving things when the lights were switched off again.
A frown of profound thoughts crinkled the little person’s forehead. Then they reached out with their tiny hand and touched his toe. Like always when people did that, it felt strange. Warm. Not at all uncomfortable. Just a bit…not like his toe usually felt.
“How many times have I told you not to touch the art?” Mom yelled, grabbed the hand of the little person and pulled them away.
Before they both disappeared through the door to the next room, the little one turned around once more, gave him another frown, and then, they smiled and winked at him.
And before he knew it, he moved one eyelid and winked back.
So, he was art.
He had assumed as much since somehow he heard that term a lot around here. He was marble and he was art. That at least was something he could cling to.
He contemplated what art could be and why people were not allowed to touch art although it felt nice. He did that until all people left the room, the doors were locked, and the lights went out.
Then, he resumed wiggling his toe. When he felt comfortable doing that, he removed his whole left foot from the plinth. It didn’t take any effort. He set it down again and lifted his right foot. That didn’t work.
He gave it a long thought why it was different. Perhaps because his weight rested on his right foot? He slowly put more weight on his left foot and then tried again.
That did it. Now he could lift his right foot.
Good. For some time he just did that. Lifted his right foot, set it down again, shifted his weight, lifted the left foot. Yes, that was like it. He could even imagine walking forward like people did. He needed to try!
He lifted his left foot and instead of setting it down again he took a big step forward.
The next thing he heard was a loud crash, he wasn’t standing upright anymore, and he had a very detailed view of the mosaic on the floor.
“Sorry,” he said to the multifaceted face of a woman riding a deer. For the first time heard how his voice sounded. And he realized that he could speak. It sounded a bit rough. Perhaps gravely? This was probably how marble sounded.
The woman on the deer, however, remained silent.
Perhaps she was still shocked or perhaps she just wasn’t the talkative type. And someone just falling onto you was for sure not the best way to make an introduction.
Besides, he had no idea what his name was so could hardly introduce himself.
He probably should focus on the more basic things first.
He cautiously shifted his limbs. Feet to stand on. Hands and arms to push upright and balance the body. It wasn’t very complicated, he just wasn’t used to it. He rose to his feet again and made a few steps. It was easy. Why had he fallen onto the floor in the first place?
He looked back at the plinth. Oh, of course. Not the same level. He had to pay attention to the height difference in things.
Nothing hurt, but he imagined that the grim-looking people were not in favor of him falling into things. He probably should avoid meeting those people altogether while he was walking around. If they freaked out at someone simply touching his butt they were probably not very fond of finding that butt not in its usual place.
But the grim-looking people that were so obsessed with his lower backside weren’t here, now, so he could do as he pleased.
He walked around the room until he felt confident on his feet. Then he approached the door.
“Caution. Alarm system active,” a big, friendly, green writing informed him.
He remembered that once an alarm had gone off because one of the little people had opened a wrong door. It was very loud. He hadn’t liked that at all, so he didn’t touch the door.
Instead, he wandered around the room. “Renaissance and Contemporary Art,” a big text panel said but when he started reading, it became confusing and boring so he decided it was written for someone else. Someone who wasn’t marble.
There was a lot of texts to read everywhere. It seemed all the things in the room had little labels with a lot of letters on them. He got curious and read the one on his own plinth.
Leonardo DiMontici
Reinvention of a naked Greek athlete as dreamed about on the 6th of January 1972
Marble, 7 feet 3 inches (2.2 meters) 1986
So, this was who he was?
Leonardo DiMontici?
Good to know. So, not only he had now confirmed he was marble, he also had a name. Leonardo. Sounded nice. And he wasn’t 8 feet tall, just 7 feet and a few inches. He wondered if he should be disappointed about that but couldn’t think of a reason. He also found nothing that looked like inches on his body, so he just memorized everything written on the label and moved on.
He tried to speak to a few other pieces which were probably also art, just not marble, but none of them seemed interested in a conversation. They didn’t react in any way although he always read the labels and addressed them with their names.
Perhaps he was the only art thing that could move and speak?
That sounded boring. And lonely.
He wondered if there was a way to leave the room without going through the door. He was really curious how the rest of this place looked and if perhaps in other rooms there were others like him.
Perhaps he could sneak out in the early morning, when the grim-looking people left the room to do whatever they had to do after they switched all the lights on?
That was a plan.
Very satisfied with himself he, Leonardo DiMontici, 7 feet 3 inches of marble art, climbed on his plinth again and resumed his original posture.
You might remember that in my New Year’s post I announced that a friend of mine is working on a book with a collections manager as main character, right? Guess what? It is out!
I am low-key proud that me talking about our profession so passionately inspired it. Well, kinda, we were touching the topic every now and then. Like the conversations with him and two friends of us (one writes horror and mystery, the other a fantasy) often go, it derailed completely from how something disappearing from a museum is among a registrar’s worst nightmares to the thought of what would happen if you realize one bright, new, early morning that, well, a whole seven feet high statue has simply disappeared from your well-guarded grounds.
Paul tackled the topic with his usual sense of humor and unusual talent for creating quirky characters. I added some reality check to it while at the same time granting enough artistic license to let it stay a riveting tale instead of becoming a novel about museum policies, loan procedures, and conflict of interest that it probably had become if I had written it. It kept me on the edge of my seat and laughing out loud so I highly recommend it, although my view is of course not really neutral.
Fun fact: While he wrote it, it inspired me to write a few chapters of a spin-off story where another statue, Leonardo, finds himself suddenly alive as a collateral damage of the events in the book. It is written from Leonardo’s point of view and you can imagine that it is quite confusing to find yourself standing on a pedestal in the middle of a museum. Especially if you haven’t been alive before. Ever. And your head is marble. This makes thinking…hard. Leonardo and his friend Betty, barista extraordinaire, even make a guest appearance in Paul’s book.
Anyway, in these dire times I feel we can all use some lighthearted humor and Egypt Calling provides you with plenty of it. If you are up for it, I here is the start of Leonardo’s story.
Update January 19th, 2025: In the light of the TikTok ban and Instagram blocking links to the Fediverse, I will soon post a second article about the bigger picture of the Fediverse, about different parts that cover different needs and are open source like Mastodon. There are alternatives for Instagram, Youtube, Facebook… but I found it would likely be overwhelming to cover them in this already lengthy article.
I avoid becoming political on here but I believe in democracy, equality, and that everybody should have the freedom to live their own life the way they please as long as they are not doing something that keeps others from doing the same. I also believe in the importance of honesty, science as a way to understand what is going on in our world and decency in treating our fellow living beings, including humans.
That said, it is obvious why I can’t stay on Twitter anymore, no matter how many connections I lose by shutting down the account. And yes, I will continue to call it Twitter as long as its owner refuses to acknowledge the name change of his own daughter.
I know that many see Bluesky as the new alternative but I don’t think that’s a viable option because while theoretically decentralized, practically it is still defined by one company and, in effect, one person, and we just see with Twitter and Meta where that leads to. Instead, I will go to Mastodon, where I already created an account in 2022 when Musk took over.
You will find me as @registrartrek@glammr.us
If some of you consider the same but don’t know how to start, here are some things I learned (I am also there with another personal account since 2022):
It all starts with picking a server and this seems to be the biggest hurdle for most. You will find a list of servers here: https://joinmastodon.org/de/servers or you can look up servers that seem to suit you and create an account there. For example, if you navigate to https://glammr.us/@registrartrek you will see my feed (I wasn’t very active so far but that’s true for my professional social media in general). On the left side you see my server and what it is it about.
To the left you see the server details including administrator, current users, and a description that states: “glammr.us is a space for folks interested in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, memory work and records. But you don’t only have to post about GLAMMR-related topics, bring your whole self!”. In the middle is my profile and – if you are on the page and scroll – my posts. At the right hand side you can create your own account.
Mastodon is a city
The concept of “servers” sounds a bit foreign perhaps, and many people fear they will narrow their options by deciding for a server, so, let’s think of it a bit differently. Let’s say Mastodon is the city you want to move to. The servers are all the streets in this city. You look at several streets, at what other people live there, what shops are in there, what the general “atmosphere” of it is. This will be your new neighborhood so you want to make sure you will feel at home and safe there.
How can you learn about your new neighborhood? A good place to start is looking at the server rules. Those you find in the “about” section in the left hand column here:
You will see if the rules of your street and see if this looks like a description of a place you would like to live in. And of course, you might know other people who already moved into a street and talk to them about how they like it.
Once you find a street that suits you, you will move into a house there by creating an account. And you will get an address so people can reach you. My address is @registrartrek@glammr.us because I am called registrartrek and I live in glammr.us street.
Many people fear that once they picked a server, they won’t be able to follow people on another server. This isn’t true. Of course you can visit people in other streets once you moved into a city! Streets are connected to other streets so you can move around the city. The same is true for Mastodon. There is a caveat, though: you already had a look at your street/server’s rules. Your street might have decided not to build a bridge to a bad neighborhood whose inhabitants display a behavior that contradicts their rules. They might even have destroyed a bridge when it turned out that too many people from the other street came over and harassed people in your street. In Mastodon terms: the general idea is that servers federate with other servers – which means nothing else than that streets connect to other streets. But at the same time it has a long-established culture of taking care of their citizens, so every street will decide which other streets they want to connect/federate to and also to defederate (destroy the bridge) if they see behavior from another street they deem unacceptable.
Setting up your address/house
With this knowledge, you simply click on “create an account” and follow the steps just like you would do on any other social media site. There are servers that are completely open and you will get access right away. Many other servers are set up in a way you have to be either approved by the server admin or need an invite by someone who already is on the server. While this is a small hurdle it helps with keeping spammers and known harassers out. If you want an invite to my “street” glammr.us just drop me a line under story@museumsprojekte.de and I’ll send you one (due to work and other stuff I don’t know if I am really faster than the server admin, though).
By the way, you can still move to another street later. If you find out you like another street better, you can pack up your things (or your followers) and move there. There is an import/export function available.
Getting to know your neighborhood
Once you settled into your new home and hung the curtains… Heck, I don’t have to explain to you how to set up a profile on social media, right? You have done that all your life. But let’s look around and get to know your neighborhood.
On the right hand side you see “Live Feeds” and if you click on that, you have the tab “This server” that shows you all the posts from all other people who are on the same server. Meaning: the more the people, topics, and culture on the server you picked resonate with your own, the more likely you will find interesting stuff and people to follow here. If you want to explore more, you can click on “Other Servers” which will give you the posts of all servers connected to your own, so, basically the chatter of all the people in all the other streets – minus the ones your street has burned the bridge to. If this is still not enough, the “All” tab shows you EVERYTHING that is going on on all the servers everywhere, so the whole Mastodon city. Ugh, that’s too much, let’s click back to your own timeline, which you see if you click on “Home”.
When you just have settled into your new home, this timeline will be empty. It will fill up with the posts from people and hashtags you follow pretty soon.
Meeting you neighbors
So, you moved into this street but people still don’t know you and you don’t know people. If you are lucky, you already know a person in the same street or at least in the city. Start by posting my address @registrartrek@glammr.us into the search field and click the “follow” button. Hi! Now my posts will appear in your timeline. You can do the same with @admin@world.museumsprojekte.de and all the posts from this blog will appear in your timeline.
That’s nice, but you already know me. You can click on my profile and see who I am following and who follows me. You might find some of those interesting and follow them, too.
But that’s the equivalent to inviting me to a housewarming party. You get to know a handful of people I know but this is by far not the whole neighborhood. You still don’t know which bakery makes the best croissants and which bar has decent margaritas, so to speak.
Next up, follow a few hashtags with stuff you are interested in. I still hope we can get #MuseumDocumentation to its old strength, for example. So, you type that in the search box and you will see people who have used it as well as a tab “hashtag”. If you click on that, you get a list of hashtags that contain the word, you can follow it and every post that contains #MuseumDocumentation will appear in your Home timeline. There is also #croissants and #SilentSunday, by the way. Hashtags make the world go round in this city of Mastodon so use them in your own posts and don’t be afraid of following many. You can still weed out later once your Home timeline gets too crowded.
Say “hi”
Next up you might want to tell everybody you moved here and who you are. For that, you might want to create a post about who you are, using the hashtag #introduction and tell people a bit about you. Don’t forget to add hashtags about stuff you are interested in, you might find like-minded folks you never thought about.
And since people might want to look at your profile to know you better and you don’t want to repeat yourself, you pin it to your profile. On most servers you can pin more than one post, on glammr.us you can pin up to five.
Oh, and don’t be afraid to just comment on someone else’s post you liked. This platform is much more driven by conversation than other places (more in the next section). Don’t be afraid to ask and talk to people.
Decentralized and no algorithm – what does it mean?
You might have heard that Mastodon is a decentralized network of independent servers and doesn’t have algorithms in place but it might be a bit nebulous what that means in your day-to-day interactions. So, here are some thoughts in a nutshell:
The servers are run by individuals or groups who are mainly doing this with their own money without commercial interest. Which means you won’t see advertisement on most servers. Which is pretty unique in a day and age where even your operating system might try to sell you something.
You might consider a donation to your server admin to help with the cost because of the first bullet point.
Twitter and other company owned platforms operate with algorithms to prioritize some posts over others. Wonder why you see Musk’s face so often when you go to Twitter? Yeah, that’s the reason. They also analyze how often a post is liked and more likes get a higher priority than posts with fewer likes. On Mastodon that isn’t the case. Here, when you go to your timeline you see all the posts from people and hashtags you follow in chronological order, nothing else. Nobody is more important than the other.
Elaborating on this: If you like a post on Mastodon what you do is you tell the one who has posted you liked what they said. Nothing more, nothing less. Your followers won’t get informed that you liked a post from somebody else.
If you want your followers to see a post you found interesting, what you have to do is boost it. On twitter this was called retweeting, boosting is nothing else, it transports the post into the timeline of the people who follow you. Again, the only difference: no algorithm is looking how often a toot is boosted to shove it into someone’s face who doesn’t want to see it.
Oh, by the way, you can actually edit posts, so if you became wiser after posting, for example because someone corrected you in a comment, you can happily go back to your original post and make the change. Those who have interacted with your post before will get notified of the change (if they haven’t disabled that option to declutter their notifications).
Culture
The atmosphere of Mastodon can vary depending on your server and who you follow. In general, I found it much more pleasant than on twitter but so far there are only a few museum professionals on, so I miss the active exchange that we had on there. But that is a question of who is active, it has nothing to do with the platform itself.
In general, there is a culture that values inclusion and this means that it is nearly like an unwritten rule to add alt-text when you post an image or gif so visually impaired people also get a sense of what your image is about.
If you post about sensitive topics – or even just a spoiler to a current TV episode or movie – there is a feature to place a Content Warning (CW) to your post. What it does: It displays just what you have written as a warning and your post only gets visible if you click on it. It might be mandatory to place content warnings for certain topics on your server. Check the about page to see them and make sure you follow them.
If you get harassed by another user, report the abusive post and it will reported to the administrator of your server who can then check and take appropriate measures. How this is handled varies by server so if this is just run by one person it might take longer than if your server has a moderation team. But, by and large, I found them far more responsive than in other places, especially since on some platforms hate speech, sexual harassment, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and lies are now acceptable behavior.
In conclusion
Although I wasn’t very active on the Mastodon account of Registrar Trek before I plan to be more in the future. But this, of course, will also depend on other people wanting to join in. See you there?
Angela
Footnotes/Further Readings
Fedi.Tips gives a good overview of features and how things are supposed to work.
Hi and welcome back on Registrar Trek. Although I am not around that frequently anymore due to real life and also due to my new job, the registrar’s community is still close to my heart.
I am also very glad that right now negotiations are going on to have it translated into Spanish. Right now it is just a matter of finding a fitting publisher, the translators are at the ready. By the way, this time around I secured the publishing rights for all other languages than English, so if you happen to know an interested publisher in your own language…
You’ll find her article “Public art and artefacts – who cares: caring for art and artefacts in the public realm; ethical considerations “ on page 401, but the whole thing is well worth a read. Trying to sum it up would be likely just rewording what is said better by Christina Kreps from the University of Denver, Colorado:
“A groundbreaking volume that critically assesses collections management from alternative perspectives. The book’s contributors destabilize the orthodoxy of “best practices” by shifting the focus to culturally appropriate models of stewardship, pushing for a more integrated, holistic praxis. Reaching beyond the typical domains of collections management, chapters cover the most salient topics in museology today. A “must read” for museum anthropology and museum studies students, practitioners, and scholars.“
A fun thing happened. I got lost in Rome. Okay, no, that is not the fun thing about it, the fun thing is that I missed the right way to the European Registrars Conference and while completely unnecessarily climbing one of those famous hills the city was founded upon, I met another registrar on her way to the conference. While finding our right way together, it turned out that Sandy Esne is more than just a registrar (okay, you could argue that this is more than enough, it is a job for two people, but you know what I mean), in her free time she also writes fiction! Her protagonist Alex Philothea gets herself caught in quite an adventure that involves Ancient Egypt, magic, mysteries, crimes… I am not saying more. You can find her KHNM series here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5NWH5FW
And speaking of books… A friend of mine who isn’t in the museum business (yes, they do exist!) is currently writing a riveting and fun book that has a curator and collections manager as main hero. It also involves Ancient Egypt and the collective registrars’ trauma of a borrowed object suddenly missing from an exhibition. It gets even more nightmarish if you think that a 7 feet statue of Ramses II one morning simply isn’t there anymore. Statues can’t simply walk away. Or can they?
I am a consultant for this project, making sure he doesn’t write something completely off about our profession while giving him enough artistic license to make it still a fun read for the public (Read: I infodump him with long explanations about loan agreements and condition reporting and he then writes “it’s on loan”.). I’ll keep you posted when it is out.
What else is going on? In February I will do my course on Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections for Museum Study LLC https://www.museumstudy.com/managing-previously-unmanaged-collections and there are still seats available. I am looking forward to Collective Imagination, Gallery Systems’ user conference which this time around is “at home” in Berlin and where I will do a few workshops and presentations https://ci.gallerysystems.com/. Otherwise, I am trying not to be too pessimistic about the future, which gets increasingly hard to do, given the current state of the world. But I am trying to focus on the good things and our profession and the sense of community I feel whenever I get a chance to meet some of you is definitely among those.
Ah, autumn. The leaves are falling, the days get shorter, little kids stand you up at your own front door, demanding sweets to protect your house from harm, just like tradition dictates. And, oh, yes, flocks of registrars, collections managers, and documentation specialists travel all over the world to hold their secret – or not so secret – gatherings. ‘Tis the season!
I am just back from a trip to St. Pölten, Vienna, and Berlin and am preparing to head out to Zürich and Rome. I am looking forward to reconnect with familiar faces and get to know new ones at the European Registrars Conference. If you attend there, too, just say “hi”. I am happy to chat with you.
If you are interested in what is new, you can catch me talking about the book online for Museum Studies LLC on Tuesday November 19 at 9 pm Continental Europe, 8 pm U.K., 3 pm Eastern, 2 pm Central, 1 pm Mountain, Noon Pacific, 11 am Alaska, 10 am Hawaii, Wednesday 9 am New Zealand, Wednesday 7 am Australian Eastern. You can register by writing to Webinar@MuseumStudy.com
I hope you are enjoying spooky season and perhaps we see each other, soon!
It might sound trivial at first that a beetle isn’t a household article but if you look closer, it isn’t. When a coffee cup breaks during a move you just go ahead and buy a new one. It gets annoying if it belonged to a set that went out of production a while ago. It becomes an irreplaceable loss if said coffee cup was connected to a special memory, for example because it belonged to your great-grandmother or because your child made it themselves.
Museum collections are pretty similar to the last case but now it isn’t just about the memory of one person or a family but about the history of humankind. Which means that the loss is far more grave.
Now, when it comes to collections of natural history an additional aspect comes into play: here, the loss of one object equals an irreplaceable loss of information that is important for current and future research. This is of course also true for art and history collections but in these cases at least the loss can be tempered if the object was well documented and digitized. Our beetle, on the other hand, is a repository in itself. Only this one specimen was collected at precisely that time and precisely that place and preserves all information about its environment at that time. No form of documentation and digitization can anticipate all the questions future generations of researchers will have. The preservation of that information is only possible by preserving the beetle itself.
Beetles in a museum collection, photo by Markéta Klimešová via Pixabay
Not all beetles belong in a collection
Because the preservation of the objects is so important generations of researchers tried to keep them out of harm’s way. Now, natural history collections are especially attractive to pests and therefore every biocide the chemical research and industry discovered in the last centuries was used in them. DDT with insect collections, arsenic with taxidermies, mercury in herbaria, from nerve toxins to organophosphates you are handling everything that can harm your health or even kill you.
In case of a collections move this means you have to deal with two aspects absent from a conventional household or office move:
You have to prevent pests from getting to your objects during transit. This means that the items you are moving need to be packed the way no pests can get inside and that you have airlocks and quarantine stations on your transport routes so you can be sure nothing got infested.
When planning the work to be done in preparation for the move you have to keep in mind that you are handling toxic goods. In the past the use of biocides was rarely documented and the only way to be sure what you are dealing with is gauging your collection before you actually start working. This will tell you which precautions you have to take previous to packing and moving and what you have to account for in the new storage.
On top of that there is another danger: the objects themselves. Some of them are toxic or radioactive and therefore you have to treat, transport, and store them differently than your common coffee cup.
Packaged beetles – No package tourists
Transports get quickly done if things can be standardized. You know that from moving house: if you can use standard packing crates they will fit seamlessly into the truck. All you have to do is pack them in a save and reasonable way and avoid overloading.
In natural history collections there are many things that can be standardized: Our beetle will most likely be stored with a lot of its fellows in one drawer and this drawer can be neatly packed and moved with other, similar drawers. But a lot of other specimen don’t do their collections managers the same favor.
Many are stored in glass containers filled with alcohol or formaldehyde which means they are not only fragile but also sensitive to vibrations and their contents inflammable and noxious. You are also not allowed to transport them through a water protection area, which you have to account for when planning the shipment routes.
This is but one example of the many special, non-standard cases you have to deal with when planning the move of a natural history collection. Some specimens are so heavy you need to hire specialized riggers to move them. Others are so fragile you need to get special crates built for them. Many are both heavy and fragile. Then others are preserved by freezing them and if you want to move them you have to make sure the cold chain stays uninterrupted. A taxidermized giraffe or the skeleton of a whale can keep a whole team of experts occupied for days just to find the best way to move it.
Storing beetles – Not a case for your local furniture store
If you have read this far you already guessed it: if you want to store a natural history collection then this storage space needs to fulfill a lot of criteria. It has to deter pests, have a stable room climate, needs a good air circulation and has to be equipped with furniture that allows objects to sit in them for centuries without being damaged yet be easily accessible for research.
Different kinds of specimen collections can have very different requirements. High humidity is a problem for most of them because it enables mold and attracts pests but a room being too dry can cause problems as well. Fluctuations in temperature can rupture the skins on taxidermy specimens and cause fossils to break. An insufficient air ventilation might cause a high concentration of toxics in a room and/or introduce mold. Good collections storage provides the appropriate climate for each of its collections. They are built the way that even in case of an emergency that results in failure of all technology a good storage climate can be re-established by conventional means in such a short time that no permanent damage or even loss of objects happens.
Accessibility is part of a safe collections storage. You need to be able to remove one specimen in a way the other objects stored with it stay unharmed. Our beetle in its drawer is a real space saver, here. Other specimens need far more space. For example, it has to be possible to remove a specimen stored in a jar of liquid from its shelf without having to move other containers. This means you can’t fill your shelves to maximum packing density and you need more storage space but for a good collections storage this is inevitable.
For all these problems there are good solutions but they are not available in your local furniture or hardware store. There are experts and manufacturers who have specialized on these topics.
Whatever is planned for your final storage has consequences for your move: If your beetle is right now in a drawer that is contaminated by pesticides or simply doesn’t fit into your new storage furniture this beetle and its comrades have to move to a new clean and fitting drawer before the move. It is rather common that one big collections move means a lot of smaller moves beforehand.
Ask the beetle anytime
When art or history collections move they often put parts of their activities in collections, exhibitions, and research on hold. A natural history collection that is part of an international network of research institutions in most cases can’t afford this comparative luxury.
In effect, this means that the move has to be planned and executed very different from other moves. It isn’t possible to pack whole collections and store them in a compact and largely non-accessible way until the big move takes place. It must be possible to get access to every collection and every specimen at any given time.
In general, there are two ways of dealing with that: You can limit the time an object is actually crated and in transit, which means that preparation, packing, moving, unpacking, and storing is a matter of just a few days. Or you can crate the specimen in a way that access is possible at any time and without endangering the object itself and the objects packed with it even during the move. Both possibilities have advantages and disadvantages but they both mean that you need more space both in the location you are moving from and in the one you are moving to. It means as well that you need more time and more staff compared to other types of collection moves.
To sum up: Why moving beetles needs a sum of money
With your own experience of moving houses in mind the amount of time, money, and staff it takes to move a museum collection seems to be comparably high. An impression that quickly vanishes when you know the reasons.
Make no mistake, no museum collection is as such “easier” or “harder” to move. Every type has its own, unique challenges. But natural history collections are for sure among the most complex ones you will encounter. And they have a disadvantage: while everybody intuitively understands that you can’t just throw the Mona Lisa on the back of an old truck, a beetle is at first sight “just” a beetle. It isn’t at all obvious that this beetle is a repository that holds perhaps more important and undiscovered information than the well researched and documented artwork by Leonardo da Vinci.
This adds an additional challenge to a move that is already made complex by the variety and sheer masses of objects that have to be brought safely from A to B: the general public has to understand that a beetle is not a coffee cup.
The new edition of “Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections” is in the making but not done. In fact, this post finds me bowed over my revising notes and frantically typing in all I have missed last time.
Time to open up the conversation, show you what I have done so far and comparing notes with you, the readers of the first edition, students from my courses, or just people generally interested in the topic.
Time for you to grab the keys – or the mike!
Join the free online talk!
Museum Study will host a free Unmanaged Collections Talk on Tuesday December 19 at 9 pm Continental Europe, 8 pm U.K., 3 pm Eastern North America, 2 pm Central, 1 pm Mountain, Noon Pacific, 11 am Alaska, 10 am Hawaii, Wednesday December 20 9 am New Zealand, Wednesday 7 am Australian Eastern.
Fall is the season for conferences and this year I will be at Gallery System’s Collective Imagination in Washington D.C. from November 13 to 17. I am excited to meet a lot of registrars, collections managers, and other people involved in museum documentation there. Of course, I will speak about managing previously unmanaged collections, this time about how to tackle them if you are using TMS. If you attend as well, drop by and say “hi”. If you don’t attend but are in the area and like to meet for a coffee, drop me a line. I can’t promise it will work out, but I will be around on the weekends before and after the conference to get to know the city, so it might.
See you there!
Angela
The Capitol and the city of Washington, image by 12019 via pixabay.
EODEM 1.0, the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model, was officially released on September 1st. But why should you, a registrar, be excited about those five letters? Isn’t it just another standard in a museum world that doesn’t lack standards – but is short of people, money, time, and, every so often, the institutional buy-in to enforce those standards?
Well, first of all, it isn’t a standard: it is an exchange model. That’s right, this isn’t something that will force you to restructure your data – although, seriously, there are good reasons to do so while you are at it, and EODEM itself is defined as a profile of the LIDO standard. EODEM is something that will enable you to exchange the data you already have about your objects with other colleagues. Something you most likely already do when you are lending, borrowing, and/or co-operating with other institutions for exhibitions.
So the tedious task of typing data from a spreadsheet or email you received from another institution could become a thing of the past with EODEM! If it is implemented, you can just import the EODEM file your colleague sent you and the information will appear in exactly the fields in your database where you need them to be. It doesn’t matter what collections management system your colleague uses. If one system can create an EODEM file from its data, you will be able to import that EODEM file in whatever system you are using!
EODEM logo
There is one big if, though: just because EODEM is out doesn’t mean it is already in your collections management system. The good news: EODEM was developed together with vendors, so, right from the start, this model was built in a way that should make it easy to implement it in most collections management systems. The bad news? Vendors of collections management systems are not big software companies, just as the museum field isn’t a big industry. So, there isn’t an armada of developers idly waiting for EODEM to be ready for them to bring it into their systems. Instead, EODEM is competing with a lot of other things to be implemented, developed, and/or fixed.
And guess what? That’s where you come in.
The more users of a particular collections management system ask their vendor about when EODEM will be available to them, the more likely it will be to get a top spot on the roadmap. So, what you, yes, you, the only registrar on staff, the loan arranger, the museum professional who wears far too many hats, can do to export and import your exhibition data with a click of a button in the future, is simply to ask your vendor when you will see that option in your own database.
Nagging someone until they finally do it just because it is easier than saying “no” or “we will see about that” to you every single time sounds familiar to you? Ha! Thought so! It is basically the job description of a registrar. Which means, you will get EODEM if you put your mind to it.
