If it moves, barcode it! Part 2

By Sheila Perry

Note: This is part 2 of the article “If it moves barcode it”, read part 1 here.

We had 3 sets of barcode labels made, with separate ranges of numbers for drawings, prints and photographs, starting from DR00001, PR00001 and PH00001 respectively. These numbers were meaningless and the only important thing was that we knew which objects were in which box. I created a big spreadsheet which showed the correlation between all the different box numbering systems, and we then used this to create an upload to our collections database which changed the box numbers there. This was slightly nerve-racking as there was a risk of the cells in the spreadsheet going out of sync when they were being manipulated. However, undoubtedly the worst part of the whole operation was attaching the labels to the boxes. The labels were provided individually on backing material and had to be peeled off, and (as with double-sided sticky tape) it was only too easy to scrunch them up while you were detaching them! The best part about having the barcodes on the boxes was that we didn’t need to print or write out any lists to record new locations when we started to move them back into the building. We just scanned them with a mobile barcode reader (a Datalogic Skorpio mobile computer) and used that to record the moves, downloading an Excel file from it at the end of each day and then feeding a ‘box upload’ to our database.

The software [PowerPick – see screenshot] that controls the three Kardex machines holds a small, simple database with a list of box numbers, two description fields which we use for the previous names for each box, and the location of the boxes within the storage system. The box number is used to enable people to cross-refer to our collections database to find the list of items in the box. So in order to retrieve a specific object, the user searches for it on the collections database, finds the box number and feeds it into the PowerPick database, which finds the location (machine number, tray number and position on the tray) and tells the appropriate machine to deliver the tray. The boxes have a ‘home location’ in the units and are usually returned to the same position after being taken out, although this can be changed in the database if necessary. On return, the barcode on the box may be scanned to enable the software to find the right location and deliver the correct tray, but in practice the box number is often typed or pasted into the search field.

No stopping us now!

Soon after this we carried out a few smaller barcoding projects to help us to track individual items. In these cases we attached sticky labels of various types to the boxes or packaging of the items. We printed the labels ourselves, which had the advantage that we could include as much extra information on them as we wanted. For the portrait miniatures collection we used conservation standard labels and included an image, the artist name, title and the accession number converted into a barcode. For some reason we always had trouble keeping track of the collection before doing this. The individual miniatures were hard to identify and it was difficult to label them effectively until they were stored in boxes. From the audit point of view it is much quicker to check through them now that they have barcodes. However one issue with ‘do-it-yourself’ labels is that the barcode occasionally turns out to be unreadable. I would say this happens in about 5-10% of cases, whereas for the pre-printed barcodes the failure rate is much less than this. As a follow-up to the portrait miniatures project we added labels with barcodes to the packaging for a collection of portrait medallions, stored in envelopes. These were also hard to track/audit until we did this.

Some of my colleagues are now at the start of an audit project for the Scottish National Gallery print room, and as part of this they have begun to attach pre-printed barcoded labels to the boxes there too. Any move that takes place will not happen for a while, so for once we have learned from experience and left ourselves enough time to get organised. The latest instalment in our efforts to drag the organisation into the 20th century [no, I don’t mean the 21st!] is under way.

What have we learned (if anything)?

• We have up to now focussed on barcoding relatively small and insignificant artworks, or more accurately their containers, and not the large valuable ones. This is not because we value the small and insignificant ones more than the others, but because the smaller ones are generally harder to keep track of and easier to mix up with one other. It might be that for the more important/larger items we should be investing in RFID instead of barcode labelling, as this could combine added security with location tracking and/or with condition monitoring. But this is a battle still to be fought.
• ‘Home-made’ barcodes don’t scan quite as reliably as the pre-printed ones – but you can convert anything you like into a barcode if you print the labels in-house, and it also provides more flexibility, allowing other information to be incorporated as required, and the ability to print off extra labels from time to time.
• Although barcoding is a good method for providing unambiguous labelling and to facilitate quick audits, there are other methods which would also work if applied with consistency and accuracy.

[Better still, barcode it before it moves…]

By Sheila Perry

Our barcoding efforts have been geared towards immediate practical needs rather than the wholesale adoption of technology by the organisation. We might have proceeded somewhat differently if we had acted strategically and attempted to barcode everything in all the National Galleries of Scotland collections. On the other hand, if we had waited to get a consensus on that we might not have done anything at all!

It begins

Our initial barcoding project was prompted by the installation of automated storage machines (Kardex) at the refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2011, but it was also the final outcome of a drive to audit every item in the prints, drawings and photographs collections. These had previously been stored, mostly in modern solander boxes, in various locations around the Portrait Gallery, a Victorian gothic structure with spiral stone staircases leading to turret and attic store rooms. We never fully understood what was kept in these areas until we had to empty out the building in 2009.
In the case of the prints and drawings the main issue at this point was the box numbering system that was then in use, although there was also doubt about whether the contents of each box were correctly recorded on our collections database, while in the case of the photography collection the main factor was that large chunks of the collection were not recorded in any way.

The boxes in which the drawings were stored were labelled with a range of numbers corresponding to an obsolete object numbering system. In some cases the labels, which were pieces of cardboard slotted into metal label holders on the front of each box, had fallen out of the label holders and got lost. Similarly, each box of prints was labelled with a range of numbers corresponding to the accession numbers of the prints that were allegedly kept in the box.

As the prints were not numbered sequentially but according to a complex system designed to record whether the print was Scottish, English or ‘Foreign’, the century in which the print was made and in some cases the coded identity of the sitter, this meant that a box might be numbered something like ‘SP IV 58.1 –150.6’. Some of the print containers had these numbers stencilled on them, often in gold, while others had cardboard labels in label holders as with the drawings boxes.

Once we moved all the boxes out of the Portrait Gallery, having added our own temporary box labels to help us place them on their new shelves in a sensible order and to record the locations on our database, the prints and drawings were stored in one temporary store and the photographs in another. Two projects got under way, one to audit the contents of the prints and drawings boxes and one to catalogue the remaining photographs.

It was mainly because we didn’t want all this tidying up to be wasted that we pressed for all the boxes to be barcoded before their return to the Portrait Gallery. The fact that they were going to be stored in an automated retrieval system which could work with a barcode reader as its input device gave us a pretext to move forward with this. There was a short debate with curators and others about whether each item should be barcoded individually or not, and an even shorter debate about barcoding versus RFID tagging, the latter turning out to be one step too far.

Read the real geeky stuff in part 2 – how they did it!

Sheila Perry is Collections Information Systems Manager at the National Galleries of Scotland, based in the Registrars Department, with responsibility for maintaining and developing the NGS collections database and associated systems. Earlier in her career she was a programmer and database designer, and she writes mystery novels under a pen-name.

Ei vahinko tule kello kaulassa.
An accident won’t arrive with a bell on its neck.
(Finnish Proverb)

A little tired we started into the second day. The decision had to be made between „Valuation and Insurance“ and „Be Prepared“. Well, I felt not prepared after going to bed at 2 a.m., so I chose „be prepared“.

The first presentation „Disaster Relief / AIC-CERT“ was divided in two parts, one about the idea and the training by Julie Bakke, Chief Registrar at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston/USA and one they called „Steve’s Reality Show“ from Steve Pine, Senior Conservator for Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston/USA.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 it became apparent that the biggest problem in saving collections is not that there are too few people who are willing to help nor is it that there is too few expertise, the problem was that there was no form of organization that brings those two much needed components together. Therefore the American Institute for Conservation developed AIC-CERT (American Institute for Conservation – Collections Emergency Response Team). It is a group of volunteers consisting of conservators and collections specialists that will offer their knowledge in case of emergency – via phone, email or on-site.

Training is always a crucial point when it comes to save collections after a disaster. People who are trained will better know what to do and much less likely lose their heads. That’s why AIC-CERT conducts trainings all over the US. Participants learn in 5 days how to form effective emergency response teams, how to work together with other emergency professionals and how to protect oneself and others. The last point is extremely important, for museum people often don’t think about their own safety when entering a disaster zone. Among the recommendations were:

• make sure you wear proper safety equipment like hard hat, gloves, masks…
• before re-entering a disaster zone make sure people know where you are going
• never go there alone, always enter with a buddy

What is crucial even in „minor“ incidents is to have an „Incident Command Post“, someone who coordinates everything that is done on site and who makes sure that all the information is flowing: safety warnings from police and fire fighters to the emergency response team, handling instructions from the advising conservators to the emergency response team, findings and new dangers detected by the emergency response teams to the officials,…

An emergency team in the way the AIC-CERT sees it consists normally of 4 people: 1 team leader, 2 people in the field and 1 logistics coordinator. Somehow registrars and collection managers seem to be a perfect fit for the logistics coordinator, because they are often responsible for their institution’s disaster plan already. They can also be good fits for the Incident Command Post.

The training of the AIC-CERT isn’t purely theoretical. They do mock disasters in their training. They set up a scenario (category 3 hurricane in the museum, fire in the library due to a short circuit…) and the training team has to go through it to learn what to do and when.

Along with this session came the information that the long known „Emergency Response and Salvage Wheel“ is now available as app for mobile devices: http://www.heritagepreservation.org/wheel/

Steve Pine reported on what AIC-CERT had done to help when Sandy stroke. In this case the MOMA acted as an information hub with conservators giving advise and coordinating help. They used their „Inside/Out“ blog to offer help and answer questions from artists whose artworks were affected by flooding. You can take a look at these posts here: http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/tag/hurricane-sandy

Steve showed pictures of the work that was done by AIC-CERT members together with artists and other volunteers to save the artworks of an artist’s colony and the costumes and props of the Martha Graham Dance Company (http://afrnyc.org/emergency-response-martha-graham-dance-company). Toilet paper instead of Japanese paper helped to dry pictures before mold could set in. Window screens were used as drying racks. An empty industrial hall as „field hospital“ for artworks and props… It was impressive to see how the professional knowledge of conservators and the spirit of improvisation resulted in saving thousands of artworks.

Fire at the museum

The next session confronted us with another registrar’s nightmare: „Fire at the Museum“. Adina Ekbergh, Security Manager of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm/Sweden reported the incidents of this black day very calmly but vividly.

When the smoke detector in the cold storage room went off they immediately evacuated the museum and the fire brigade arrived 7 minutes later. Unfortunately, smoke had infected the storage rooms in the vicinity of the cold storage room and the fire sprinklers did their work for 13 minutes, soaking the artifacts stored there. Fortunately, Adina was on site and immediately entitled to coordinate everything that was necessary by upper management.

When the fire fighters had everything under control all doors were opened to let the smoke out and staff members guarded the doors. Most staff members waited on site to go back into the building to help with recovery. But unfortunately, the forensic investigation couldn’t be completed on that day and the building was sealed at midnight. The investigation continued the next day. Needless to say, the museum staff couldn’t begin with the treatment of the wet artifacts before the forensic investigation was completed. Precious time passed, and as a collection of feather, fur and leather artifacts was affected, the 24 hours that passed before staff could begin with recovery were enough for mold to set in.

As soon as they could enter, the recovery began. They decided to freeze everything that was infected. From Thursday to Saturday every staff member helped with the treatment. At first they worked without protective equipment because there weren’t enough masks and gloves on site. Shopping for this equipment was one of the first tasks!

Adina pointed out that they learned a lot from this disaster:

• Always have enough protective equipment at hand, because one can be sure that everybody wants to help but health of staff members should come first! Adina put it this way: we regard ourselves as professionals working with items, not as people. Therefore we often forget to consider health risks.
• If someone offers help, don’t say no. Don’t underestimate how disasters are physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
• No items should stand on the floor!
• Write a diary of what happened when in the incident – you forget!
• Involve the neighbors.
• Have good connections to officials like fire brigade and police – establish them before something happens.
• Train your staff for disasters.

The reason for the fire was identified as high voltage in a sensor of cold storage room. Pondering about the safety of our own collections we left for coffee break.

Vahinko tulee viisaallekin.
Even the wise one sustains damage.
(Finnish Proverb)

The last sessions of the first day saw two speakers who were were different in appearance and presentation style but who definitely pull together when it comes to bringing back lost art: Christopher A. Marinello, Director and Founder of Art Recovery International and Rune Sivertsen, Detective Superintendent of the Norwegian Police. It was the eloquent lawyer and the straightforward law-enforcer speaking – and we were all spellbound for the next one and a half hours.

„Who steals art?“, asked Chris Marinello at the beginning of his presentation „Art lost and found“. He made it clear that art thieves are not at all like they are depicted in Hollywood movies like „The Thomas Crown Affair“ or „Entrapment“. There is nothing romantic or heroic about them, they are just ordinary criminals, the type of guys who steal wallets.

Art theft is an „industry“ making 6 billion dollars per year. But how many „good guys“ are there to prosecute these thefts? Marinello had it in figures: In Italy there is one Art Crime Police Officer for 200,000 inhabitants. In the UK it’s one for 15 million inhabitants and in the US it’s one for 20 million inhabitants. Only 15% of lost art is ever recovered. This is one of the reasons why, in Marinello’s opinion, it’s necessary to have help from the private sector.

He introduced the database „Art Claim“ for stolen, looted and missing works of art. One idea is that museums and collectors can register their art works there before anything happens to them. This makes it clear who the original owner is, so art dealers can check the data base when an artwork is presented to them to make sure it isn’t stolen. Police can check the database when they discover an artwork, for example after a razzia.

Another part of the work of Art Recovery International is the negotiation in restitution cases. Chris talked about some difficult cases, including one from the Gurlitt art find. One can only imagine the difficulties of negotiating in cases where something is regarded as legally acquired under the law but still, morally, belongs to the original owner. Convince someone to give a work of art back without compensation just to do the right thing and to right a wrong that happened long ago? Sounds like really hard work.

Now Rune Sivertsen entered the stage for „The Robbery of The Scream and The Madonna from Munchmuseet in 2004“. We were all ears when this police officer revealed the bitter truth of this theft.

There were some circumstances that made it easier for the robbers, although they couldn’t foresee them: The security guard was positioned outside the room where „The Scream“ and „The Madonna“ were on display and the alarm system attached to the pictures was not properly maintained so it didn’t go off when the pictures were removed. The robbers where well prepared for other circumstances: one carried a gun and they used fitting foam glue to silence the alarm bell.

But there were lucky incidents, too: The robbery was filmed and one witness unknowingly took a picture of the getaway car. While the robbers were masked, the driver wasn’t and was identified. Another robber was identified because he wore the same clothes when arrested in another case. But still it took 2 years and 7 days to recover the pictures, which suffered major damages, and to arrest all the robbers.

What really shocked us as museum professionals was when the true reason for the theft became apparent: The pictures were not stolen to steal art and sell it. They were only stolen to distract attention and absorb manpower of the police from the investigation of a major monetary robbery at NOKAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOKAS_robbery) conducted by the same organization of criminals! Even more shocking – if possible: The sentences for the robbery were low, the only one who was sentenced to a significant amount of time in jail for this crime was the one who carried a loaded gun…

With the impression that maybe its only we who regard art theft as a „serious“ crime we went off to the Midsummer Party at Kiasma…

This post is also available in French, translated by Marine Martineau.

Älä laita kaikkia munia samaan koriin.

All eggs should not be put in one basket
(Finnish proverb)

After the opening introductions and first session „But is it art?“ by Daniel Birnbaum there were parallel sessions: Security Matters and Couriering 101. As we seldom courier in my museum, I chose security.

Maybe the most impressive presentation was given by Tygve Lauritzen, Head of Security and Operations at the Munchmuseet in Norway. His presentation included practical hands-on security advice for transportation as well as a few general warnings.

What impressed most of us deeply was a map showing attacks on trucks in Europe (green lowest, red highest):

In fact, art that is transported on the road is 1000 times more at risk than art that is delivered by airfreight – which is somehow logical but also frightening. One of the thoughts Tygve gave was to reconsider sending couriers on these roads. In his view the risk you impose on your most valuable good – the life of your colleague – is much higher than the benefit. What can the courier do if the truck is on fire? What can he/she do when the truck is held up and hijacked by false police?

Transporting art on the road is a risk in itself that can only be reduced, but not avoided by good organization. Some of the recommendations were:

• planning the drive ahead, including breaks, safe parking possibilities and alternative routes
• providing the drivers with all the phone numbers and directions what to do and whom to call in which occurring situation
• providing the drivers with printed out cards saying „I’m not allowed to open the window, please call name/number and escort me to the next police station“ (in all languages of countries the truck has to pass). Many cases of trucks hijacked by criminals dressed as police are known and drivers should not open the windows for their safety. Real police has no problem with escorting a truck to the next police station.
• number locks that only show the same number if they were not opened during the transport is a good way to check if something went wrong on the trip

Considering the risk that something might happen on the road it is only logical to define a value limit for art transported on one truck. This is easy on paper but the key is to enforce this policy under all circumstances in the practice.

Tygve stressed out that it’s important to go into „future crime mode“ as registrars. Art is nowadays used as a form of payment in organized crime and we shouldn’t underestimate the risk. We should be prepared that insider information is very valuable to the criminals and that they are very actively trying to get it. Seemingly harmless questions like „Can you give me a telephone list of your institution?“ are not harmless at all. In fact, if you hand it out it’s like you opened a backdoor for the criminals. They will start to do researches on these people to find a weak point, and they will find it. Someone in urgent need of money, someone with an alcohol illness, someone with personal problems…

Thinking in „future crime mode“ also applies to document security. We are often not aware that information we send per email or carry around on our phones or tablets are also documents. Some of Tygve’s recommendations:

• Password protect every document before you email it. Be aware that normal, unprotected email is something like a postcard – the content can be easily spied out. Never ever send documents open.
• Give the password to people who need to read the documents per phone, not per email.
• Dropbox is not a safe place for documents with sensitive information.

In the next session Simon Mears, Consultant for Security Risks and High Value Asset Protection in Denmark, introduced GRASP, the Global Risk Art Survey Program. It is a system invented by insurers as a reaction to certain incidents that involved art, like thefts or fires. It is a holistic approach to make a risk assessment in all fields of possible risks for a collection, including not only thefts and catastrophes, but also damages due to climate issues.

The last speaker was Pascal Matthey, Head of Speciality Risk Engineering, XL Group, Switzerland. He talked about Holistic Risk Management for Museums. Some of the key thoughts I still remember:

• In holistic risk management, you have to look at the Maximum Foreseeable Loss (MFL) in one incident. It’s Murphy’s Law in practice: a fire starts, the sprinklers don’t work, fire brigade is late… how high is the maximum foreseeable loss?
• Be aware that insurance has nothing to do with risk management in the first place – the money doesn’t bring back the lost art and it doesn’t bring back your reputation after a theft.
• A good approach to do holistic risk management is risk aggregation, to define the risks for different parts of the museum instead of defining the MFL for the entire loss of the collection, which is very unlikely to happen. This will also help to keep insurance rates at a reasonable height.
• Example: The highest risk for your galleries might be theft and fire, so here you try to reduce risks through organizational measures (i.e. do everything that a thieve has to invest much time into stealing and leaving the building, so police has a chance to catch him when he’s still in the building) and insure the MFL in case of fire and theft. If the galleries are not on the ground floor, damage done by high water might be low. If your storage is in the cellar, here the risk of fire might be low, but you will insure the MFL in regards to high water.

As you can imagine, we had enough food for thought and talk for the following lunch break…

This post is also available in Italian, translated by Silvia Telmon.

When people ask me how my trip to Helsinki went I start telling them with enthusiasm about the beautiful city, the white nights, the friendly people, the good food, the seagulls,… only to realize then that what they really wanted to know is if there was something useful, innovative, important or in any way interesting at the conference. Okay, sounds legit, after all this wasn’t a holiday trip, although I had lots of fun.

Of course there were lots of interesting things to take away from the sessions. In order to tell it in a way that makes sense to someone who couldn’t attend I started with ordering my thoughts and my notes. The last one was easy, I constantly tweeted from the conference so I only needed to put together a storify to have an easy to access notepad: https://storify.com/RegistrarTrek/erc2014-the-twitter-notepad. I did the work to order the tweets by sessions two times, but unfortunately the program messed it up without me knowing what I’ve done wrong and without the possibility to right the wrong without investing hours. (Note to self: write post about the possibilities and challenges of tweeting from a conference).

Just when I started my report, I realized that the UK Registrars Group had set up a new blog where they posted articles about all the sessions. You can find it here: http://ukregistrarsgroup.blogspot.co.uk/

Because of this I feel somehow relieved from the pressure of reporting in an overarching way and instead can focus on some points in the sessions that seemed especially important to me. I will report in several posts in the order the sessions came up at ERC 2014.

And now, before we dive into the sea of registrar’s techno-babble, please allow me one last picture taken while approaching Helsinki accompanied by the words of the Finnish writer Alexis Kivi, which I unfortunately only found in English:

What is that land of hill and dale
That is so beautiful,
The land aglow with summer days,
Land with the northern lights ablaze,
Whose beauty all the seasons share,
What is that land so fair?

The Finnish Land

This post is also available in French translated by Aurore Tisserand.

Reports from ERC 2014:
ERC 2014: Security Matters
ERC 2014: Assessing Risk in Lending and Borrowing
ERC 2014: Art Theft and Recovery
ERC 2014: Be Prepared!
ERC 2014: Moving Collections

Additional stuff from ERC 2014:
Home from Helsinki: Presentation from ERC2014
Inside the mind of a registrar

Just arrived home from Helsinki and it will take a few days to review notes, pictures, thoughts… everything. I’m still overwhelmed by the various impressions from the conference, the speeches, the presentations, the high professionality and friendliness of our hosts from the Nordic Registrars Group, the talks with colleagues, the laughter and the fun and especially from the politeliness and discreet warmth of the Helsinki people. But at least I want to make the presentation I did at the end of the conference available to all of our readers. More reports coming up.

The Next Generation: Breaking Barriers with the Project Registrar Trek

Hyvää päivää. Mitä kuuluu?
Mina olen saksalainen.

Unfortunately, these are the only words I can speak in Suomi, one of the languages in this wonderful country that I had the pleasure to be a guest in for the last few days.
Not more than “Hello, how are you, I’m German.” There is a barrier, a language barrier. Today, I’m speaking about breaking down barriers. Language barriers and other barriers.

Maybe as we sit here together we think that language barriers can be overcome by learning another language. This way we are able to communicate and exchange thoughts, for example in English. While it is true that English enables us to hold conferences like this one, we should keep in mind that we all have just crossed a barrier that leaves other colleagues behind. Who attends this conference? Registrars and collection managers who feel able to follow a conference that is held in English. Others who are not so confident about their language skills stayed at home.

The language barrier might be a problem in understanding each other. But on another level we understand each other very well: we share the language of collections people.

If we talk about lending and borrowing, about storage needs and documentation problems we understand each other, no matter what our mother tongue is and which continent we are from. We understand each other so well that it doesn’t come to mind how difficult it is for other people to understand what we do. This is a barrier not only between us and the visitors in our museums; this is even a barrier between other museum professionals and we, the collections people.

There’s a third barrier. A barrier that is so close to us that we need others to let us see it: it’s the barrier of our everyday work experience, the barrier of our own museum’s walls.
Today, I’m going to introduce a project we started a while ago to work towards breaking these barriers. Some of you might know it already: It’s called Registrar Trek: The Next Generation.

I think there’s no use in clicking through a website and telling you what you see at a conference. That can be better done at home. I think it’s better to tell you something about the general idea of this project, about the spirit of Registrar Trek:

Let us now start to approach the three barriers, starting with the language barrier.

Breaking down the language barrier

The language barrier was the barrier that originally started this project.
We started with three languages: English, Spanish and German. Sure, our translations weren’t always perfect, but it was a start. As soon as we started,

others joined us and right now we have 30 translators from 19 countries providing 16 different languages.

Of course, we don’t have all the posts in all languages right from the start. We are volunteers, mainly working in museums, some studying, some interning, some retired, others job-hunting. So, you can imagine that we are all busy. But because we are many, most of the time we can provide at least 2-3 languages when publishing a new post. Others are added as soon as they arrive.

The good news is that you can’t have too many translators. The more translators we have, the easier it is to balance the workload and the faster we are in adding translations.
So if some of you want to join, I will be glad to say: welcome on board.

Let’s approach the second barrier: The barrier of registrar’s lingo.

Breaking down the barrier of registrar’s lingo: Telling what we really do

We all know what we do every day. When we talk to each other we don’t have to explain many things. We know what a loan contract is and what a disaster plan looks like, we understand categorizing issues, we feel for a colleague that has to upgrade to a new version of a data base, the list goes on and on.

When we talk to “strangers” about our profession we often realize that it’s extremely hard to explain in a few words what the job of a registrar or collections manager consists of.
The question is: why is it that way? We have such a wonderful, thrilling job, why is it so hard to get the message across? So hard, sometimes even our family members have no idea except that we “work at a museum”?

Personally, I think a big part of the challenge is that we try to explain our jobs in an abstract way.

Let me give you an example: I sit together with colleagues at lunch. The educator tells how he guided a difficult class, the press officer tells how she organized a great speaker for the next event and I say that “I did some integrated pest management”.

While I understand what the educator and the press officer did, they don’t understand what I did.
Why didn’t I break this barrier by saying that I had checked and baited mouse traps the whole morning? Well, that’s not exactly slaying dragons, but in the museum perspective, it’s pretty close.
That’s exactly the approach of Registrar Trek to break this barrier: by telling stories.

I know that „storytelling“ has become a buzzword in the museum field, but the truth is: telling stories is a very ancient way of getting messages across in an entertaining way.

A story about what one has to consider when storing earphones or how one built a box for hundreds of buttons gives a better impression of our job to an outsider than collection policies and job descriptions.

A story about how you climbed the roof of your storage area five times to supervise the craftsmen working there will give a better hands-on impression of the job duties than any handbook.

It will help students and young emerging museum professionals decide if collections is really the perfect fit for them or if it might be better to pursue the marketing or education path.

A story about how you found information about an object that proves its significance for the collection and your community will give other museum professionals like educators and press officers food for their own work and an idea why the work you do is important for the museum.

But telling stories can also help us to approach the third barrier: the barrier of your own museum’s walls.

Breaking down the barrier of the own museum’s walls

When you work for a specific museum a long time you become blind to its shortcomings and, more often, you don’t see what works well any more. I brought you a picture:

I don’t know how many of you have had this kind of situation. When you are heading for a museum career you absorb everything about best practices, about good storage conditions, about wearing white gloves. Then you take up a job and start with all the enthusiasm of the young, aspiring museum professional. And then, the real museum world hits you.

In short: you have all the knowledge and the guidelines how it should be but literally no one has prepared you for the situation as it will be.

The trouble is that reading guidelines and official publications of museum associations in such a situation isn’t helpful. Instead it’s depressing. But what might be helpful or at least encouraging is to read stories about how someone brought order to such a mess – or how it could be worse. And if you cleaned out this mess it can feel fabulous to write an article for Registrar Trek about it.

I think our author Anne T. Lane said it best when she said:

“Our triumphs are not like other people’s triumphs. Our crises are not like other people’s crises. It’s good to find ourselves part of a community that understands.”

And maybe, when you publish it, you will suddenly get feedback from colleagues from around the world helping you to see your own situation from a different angle.
When you and I look at the picture the immediate thought is: “What a mess! We have to start cleaning and wrapping those objects, someone go, fetch some archival boxes”
But in a small rural museum in Germany, your colleague (who most certainly will also hold the title of director, visitor guide, administration officer, janitor and webmaster) will say: “Oh, lucky you! You have a room for storage, the roof isn’t leaking and it seems all those objects have labels!”

So, the benefit of writing stories and articles for Registrar Trek is not only to help and encourage others, it can also be a chance of reflecting on our own position. And you create a chance for professional discussion.

Best practices are in constant development and improvement and need creative input that comes out of our everyday, hands-on working practice.

Breaking barriers needs many heads and hands

Right from the start Registrar Trek was meant to be a project designed to involve many people from our profession. It was never about one or two people telling their stories and the others just translating and commenting. (Otherwise I would constantly bore you with stories out of collection management in a German Science and Technology Museum).

We wanted to have collection professionals from around the world bringing in their views, their articles, and their stories. For example, Tracey Berg-Fulton who did the wonderful session before this one wrote an article about how she became a registrar, and that’s just one out of many.

We want you to bring in your views, your articles, and your stories.

The core of Registrar Trek is that it is a common project of colleagues. Standing here alone and telling you about Registrar Trek feels somehow wrong. So, to speak for the authors of Registrar Trek I’m very glad to have Derek Swallow here from the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria.

Derek Swallow enters the stage and says the following part:

Thank you Angela.

I want to very briefly touch on two points: how you can contribute if you choose and secondly the rewards of being a Registrar Trek author.

Currently we have four main sections in Registrars Trek any of which you can contribute to: the first is Articles which covers broader issues of common interest and a share point for ideas; next is Stories – this section is comprised of real shared events celebrating learning by way of our successes and failures; the third is called the Registrars Tool Box containing practical solutions, and facts to assist with our day-to-day work; and finally Registrar Humour – I find I need a daily dose of humour to keep me sane in this wonderful but stressful job.

Now the rewards of being a Registrar Trek author: personally, it’s about the process of engaging in communication about museum topics with collections specialists from all over the world. For example, in past articles I’ve presented a new approach to conducting collections committee meetings adopted recently at my museum. I’ve also posed the question: how does authenticity relate to collecting in the 21 century museum? I’ve discussed how our roles as registrars are perceived or misperceived by both the general public and other museum employees.

As a result of writing these articles I’ve received important feedback which has helped evolve and clarify my ideas as a professional in this field as well as establish professional connections with colleagues in Europe, North America and Africa.

I want to leave you with one final thought. In this room 34 nations are represented. If even one person from each nation were to join Registrar Trek as a writer or contributor what an amazing network of communication would open up for us all and can you imagine how broad and rich our exchange of ideas would be?

I thank you all.

Thank you so much, Derek.

I believe we’ve said all we wanted to say about our project. Don’t forget we are always glad to publish your stories. Maybe you haven’t killed a dragon. But maybe you found a great new way of reorganizing your storage space. Or to pack an X-Ray-tube. Or you accidentally loaned 200 artifacts and want to tell others how to avoid this.

Keep up the good work, thanks for listening and may the road rise to meet you.

Kiitos paljon, Helsinki!

This post is also available in Italian, translated by Marzia Loddo.

by Rupert Shepherd

If you were given a choice between donating money for museum conservation, education, or documentation, would you give to documentation?

I was offered this choice by a collecting box at one of the London national museums just before Christmas last year. Or rather, I was given a choice between conservation and education: documentation didn’t feature. This made me think: documentation seldom appears in public discussions of what museums do.

If you’re reading this blog, then I think you already know what documentation is. For what it’s worth, my definition falls into two parts. Documentation comprises: looking after the information a museum has about its collections; and making sure that the museum is able to account to its public, its funders, and anyone else for its collections and everything that happens to them. And I’m sure you also understand that a museum’s documentation is as central as its objects to everything it does: without documentation, the collections are a meaningless pile of odds and ends. If we don’t know what the objects are and where they come from, we cannot meaningfully display them or help people understand them.

Why, then, does documentation so seldom appear in public? After my encounter with that collecting box, I thought I’d ask my colleagues across the museum community, so I started a discussion on LinkedIn, in Collections Trust’s Collections Management group (you need to have joined the group to read it). The discussion was fascinating, and this blog is really an attempt to pull it together into something more structured and condensed.

Why is documentation important?

In the UK and, I expect, around the world, publicly-funded museums are under great financial pressure: we’re expected to do as much work as we’ve always done – if not more – with less and less money. As a result, we need to look more widely for funding even for our core activities. A few months ago, I was talking about the difficulty in funding day-to-day documentation work with my museum’s director, and she said something which I’ve taken to heart: ‘you need to tell the story’. There’s no point continually saying documentation’s important: we have to say why it’s important.

In an attempt to provide a really inspiring argument for documentation’s significance, I asked people in the LinkedIn group to provide their explanations – ideally, in the 140 characters or fewer needed to create a tweet. (There’ll be more about Twitter later.) There were some great, pithy responses, and a few weeks ago I tweeted one of these a day for a couple of weeks. I’ve Storifyed them here. They pretty much reinforce what I said before: without documentation, we can’t understand or do anything meaningful with our objects, and so we can’t use them to do all those inspiring things we pride ourselves in. And, of course, we need to know where our objects are, be able to prove that we own them, and so on.

One or two contributors took the wider view: Registrar Trek’s own Angela Kipp said that ‘without documentation, humanity loses its memory’ – and ‘losing your memory means losing yourself’. And perhaps my favourite, for its sheer enthusiasm, came from Barbara Palmer, registrar at the Powerhouse Museum: ‘I uncover hidden treasures and make them accessible. I feel like I have the best job in the world.’

Why isn’t documentation more visible to the public
(and why does this matter)?

But is this the right way to proceed? Nick Poole, for one, suggested that we shouldn’t be dividing museums up into separate activities like this: what is important, he said, is the end result. After all, supermarkets focus on the quality of what they sell, not on how it got to their shelves.

But with all respect to Nick, I think this misses the point slightly. In many other fields, the infrastructure is visible: to stay with Nick’s example, supermarkets advertise the freshness of their produce by saying things like ‘from the farm to our shelves in two days’, and we can all see supermarket shelf-stackers and the trucks that carry the produce across the country. In museums, we show off our exhibitions, displays, interpretation, and websites – but visitors can’t see the infrastructure used to create it. When do we ever say ‘this exhibition was brought to you using the quality data in our collections management system’?

And should we be comparing museums to supermarkets anyway? Angela reminded us that museums exist not just to display objects, but also to educate, collect, research, and preserve our objects for future generations and researchers: we all know that not everything we collect ends up going on view to the public straightaway, and much of the research done on the collections does not lead immediately to a new piece of public interpretation. But in the UK, at least, I can’t help feeling that Angela’s is a somewhat unfashionable view: we are constantly being asked to justify what we do in tangible, measurable and visible ways, hence the focus on the public outputs.

Other people, such as Michaelle Haughian and Shaun Osborne, suggested that documentation was primarily of interest to other museum people: the public don’t need to see how it works. Michaelle wondered whether ‘the crux of this issue isn’t the way funds are allocated? Do we need to have a second discussion about the bare bones funding models museums are accustomed to? Do we need to talk about why education and programming seem to get more money than collections or registration work?’ This is a point that Angela also made: ‘people decide to fund what they know, see and take part [in] in museums (educational programmes, tours) and not something that is hard for them to imagine, because it needs explanation (conservation, documentation, public relations, administration…).’

I think this is the fundamental problem: if you don’t know something exists, how do you know that it’s important, let alone that you could fund it? And perhaps, as Shaun also suggested, what’s important is not that documentation should be made visible to the public, but that it should be made visible to our senior managers, our trustees, and our funders.

Why is documentation a ‘problem’
(and how did we get to where we are today)?

Nick also suggested that one problem we face when making the argument for documentation is that we tend to see it as a problem: we have a horrible tendency to append the word ‘backlog’ to it. Thinking about my own organisation, the Horniman Museum, we do have backlogs of various kinds, and I would certainly say that they are problems: one reason I’ve been concerned about documentation’s public profile is my wish to clear some of the backlogs which are preventing my museum from working as efficiently as it might. In the current funding climate, we have to work as effectively as possible: poor documentation hinders this; really good documentation enables it.

Backlogs arise for various reasons. At least in older museums, they exist in part because of the way our current data has been generated: from what I know of my own institution, our records started as register entries, which were expanded into index cards, which were built upon to form catalogue cards, which were imported into an early database, which were in turn imported into MultiMimsy, which were then imported into Mimsy 2000, and then imported into Mimsy XG. (At the Ashmolean, over 200 separate databases were imported into their first museum-wide collections management system, MuseumPlus.)

Every stage represents an opportunity for inaccuracies to creep in (in the manual conversions), and kludges to be made when importing or transferring data (in digital systems) in order to get something up and running in a reasonable time. We always promise ourselves that we will come back to it and tidy it up; and then something else comes up, the opportunity has gone, and we have – a backlog of data tidying.

And this leads to a second reason why backlogs build up: straightforward lack of resources. Museums simply don’t have the people needed to do the work that needs to be done (particularly, that needs to be done now if we’re to create records that we don’t have to keep coming back to). In many organisations, as documentation tasks are increasingly passed to volunteers, placements or interns rather than paid staff in an attempt to get something done, so more of the work needs to be checked and revisited to ensure it’s fit for purpose; and we don’t always have the time to do that as much as we would wish.

Why has this all become so labour-intensive? Graham Oliver, who’s worked as a curator for 35 years, reminded us that documentation used to be part of a curator’s work – but the people contributing to the LinkedIn discussion were called ‘curator, documentation officer, collections information systems manager, content manager, access officer’, and so on. The last two or three decades have indeed seen a huge increase in specialisation in the museum world. When documentation consisted of registering an acquisition, creating index cards for it, pulling one’s research into a history file, and updating a location card when the object moved, it was easier to incorporate it into one’s day-to-day curatorial work.

But then computers arrived, and they became the preserve of specialists – understandably, if you look at a system like Mimsy XG, which we use at the Horniman: there are something like 3000 different, discrete units of information in there, and to configure it, maintain it, and keep the data consistent is a specialist job which the vast majority of people who work in museums simply wouldn’t want to do. So documentation jobs were created to manage the information, and to make sure that the procedures drawn up in Spectrum over the last 20-30 years were being implemented and tied into the computerised information: suddenly, there was a new sub-discipline within museums. Many curators took to it; others, alas, didn’t. The same is true of the many other specialists doing the work that used to be done by curators – and there were far fewer curators then, than there are now staff doing all those specialised jobs.

And as documentation has become more and more of a specialism, other museum staff have become less aware of some of the problems which can arise if it’s not done just right. There are a couple of misunderstandings which I think have been particularly pernicious, and have made it much harder for us to argue for resources to address our backlogs.

The first is the database pixie delusion. A senior curator (I’m naming no names, not even institutions, here) once said to me that their ideal collections database would comprise one field, into which they would type what they knew about the object. The database would then organise this information so it could be used effectively. The delusion is the belief that you simply have to put your collection information into a database and everything will be all right. It doesn’t matter that the data is inconsistent, mis-spelt, or incomplete: it’s in a database, so of course it’ll be OK. After all, the database contains little pixies that will get the data tidy (even proof-read it), consistent, linked, and so on. Our colleagues sometimes seem to have had a touching faith in the intelligence of computers, whilst those of us who work with them more frequently know that they are fundamentally dumb, and that if you put rubbish in, you’ll get rubbish out.

Related to this is the Google delusion. We’re now very used to using web search engines to find information. We type something into Google, say, and if we get one useful result in the first page, we reckon it’s worked pretty well. On the other hand, in a well-maintained database, if you run a search, your results will be all the objects that are precisely what you are looking for, and no others.

Again, this reminds me of a conversation I once had with a colleague. We were talking about searching for objects made of copper alloy, and how one would run the search. Ideally, you would enter ‘copper alloy’ in a materials field, and get back all those objects made of copper alloy, and no others. But my colleague was quite happy to run a series of separate searches, for ‘copper alloy’, yes, but also for ‘Cu alloy’, ‘CuA’, ‘bronze’, and so on: in their mind, if they were able to do this and get back most of the relevant objects across all these searches, along with some others which weren’t really relevant, the database was working well. They didn’t seem to realise that this made it much harder to then reuse that information by generating reports or lists of objects which could be used outside the system.

If we return to Google and think of the amount of research and development that has gone into its search algorithms, then we can see that it’s a massively expensive tool for indexing really poorly-structured data, and it does so adequately, at best. It has lowered our expectations of data retrieval in an extremely unhealthy way.

Raising documentation’s public profile

As you can see, I agree with Nick when he says that there’s been a long-standing culture clash between documentalists, who tend to be systems thinkers, and our colleagues who are, as he says, ‘value-driven creative people with a strong set of social values’. This has led to the need to explain the value of documentation in terms of its end users. I’d also agree with Nick that we need to argue for a museum and funding culture that recognises that ‘a building with things in it, but without knowledge or skilled people, is not a museum. And people deserve museums.’

So we come back to how best to make those arguments. As we’ve seen, our LinkedIn discussion broadly divided into two camps: first, those who feel that it’s not worth raising documentation’s profile to the public, because it’s part of a process that leads to public outputs like displays, exhibitions, engagement or learning events, and those end results are what’s important; and second, those who think that it is worth publicising what we do for its own sake. There was also a group who suggested that documentation should be bundled up as part of general presentations of ‘behind the scenes work’, and this in particular is something that I think we could all try and pursue.

But generally speaking, I think I’m still part of the second group. Something else that persuaded me to start the discussion was a passing comment when I was in a meeting. One of our conservators said that work had just been finished on an object, and our Digital Media Manager’s immediate response was ‘Great! Can you write me a blog about it? Everyone loves a conservation blog.’ Our conservation department has its own page on our website, linked to ten case studies. Our Documentation (and Collections Management) departments don’t – even though we’ve been making significant contributions to aspects of the museum’s work as diverse as our online collections, our Collections People Stories collections review, and our famous walrus’s recent trip to the seaside at Margate.

Like that national museum’s collecting box, this showed me that we do publicise our behind the scenes work – but only certain parts of it. And as Angela said, what’s visible is what people think of funding when they reach for their cheque books. Yes, we need to raise documentation’s profile with our managers; but we also need to spread the word more widely, because in the end, it’s not just our managers who provide our funding.

So how can we do this? When I started the discussion on LinkedIn, I also suggested that everyone working in museum documentation who had a Twitter account should tweet what they’ve been doing each day, and – crucially – why it’s important, using the hashtag #MuseumDocumentation. A couple of weeks after we began, Angela Storifyed some of the tweets; and you can also follow them here:

Tweets about “#MuseumDocumentation”

Even if our followers are only our family, friends, or colleagues, it’s a start; but the more momentum we can gather, the more word will spread beyond our immediate circle; and our managers, and perhaps even our funders, will start to understand that documentation really is worth supporting. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s contributed to the discussion so far, both on LinkedIn and on Twitter: I’ve been hugely impressed by everybody’s enthusiasm for, and dedication to, what we do. I’d also encourage everyone else to have a go at tweeting about #MuseumDocumentation: I’ve found the experience of saying why what I do is important, in a new way every day, quite challenging – and stimulating.

Has it been working? Well, our Digital Media Manager did come through and ask me to write a short blog post about documentation and the hashtag for our website; and I have been interviewed for an article on documentation to go in the Museums Journal, as well as being asked to write a short piece for the Museums & Heritage Magazine. So maybe we’re beginning to raise our profile a bit.

Oh – and when I went back to that London national museum, the collection box no longer offered you a choice ….

 
About the author:
Rupert Shepherd initially trained as an art historian, specialising in the Italian Renaissance, before moving into museum documentation, dabbling in humanities computing and digitisation along the way. He was Manager of Museum Documentation at the Ashmolean Museum for three years, and since 2010 has been Documentation Manager at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in south-east London – but the views he expresses in this post are his own.

by Derek Swallow

Innovation in such areas as exhibition methodology, education programs, revenue generation is expected in the 21st Century museums. This is not always the case for core museum processes. However, necessity can drive such innovation. Many twenty-first century museums face the harsh reality of shrinking budgets. One impact: fewer staff with heavy workloads. To maintain high service standards and internal best practices museum personnel look for ways to work more efficiently. Better time management is one solution. New measures such as pruning the number and length of meetings can conserve this now precious commodity – time. Modifying the delivery and structure of tradition museum business meetings is an area where savings can be found. In early 2013, the Royal BC Museum, where I work, launched a pilot project, aimed simultaneously at carving down our collections committee meeting time and building a more flexible, egalitarian process.

Traditionally, our committee composed of curators, archivists and a conservation representative, guided by a chair person, met monthly for one and a half hours: its mandate to decide which new collections, proposed by discipline curators or archivists, would be accepted into the Royal BC Museum permanent holdings as well as adjudicate recommended collection deaccessions. The agenda, provided electronically to members several days before the meeting allowed time to digest the information about each proposed acquisition including the proponent curator’s acquisition proposal (rationale for acquisition) and the conservation department report. The latter included the general to specific condition of the collection and its components, specifying the time needed to both stabilize and preserve these components over the long term. Armed with this data the members of the collections committee, along with the curator/archivist proponent for each collection, attended the monthly meeting. The proponents “presented” their collections, fielded questions, then the committee would vote. Proposed deaccessions were handled in a similar manner. I suspect this is a familiar format for many of your institutions.

The new model at the Royal BC Museum displaced face-to-face meetings with “virtual” consultation and decision making. By “virtual” I mean that all information transfer, and collection discussions, between collection proponents and committee members, is done via electronic means through email. All processing tracking documents, agendas, collections voting lists, and committee decision postings exist as Excel and Word documents and “live” in digital format on a common drive.

Along with the process the committee structure changed. An egalitarian measure was built in: members now included collections managers as well as curators and archivists. The registrar, previously the recording secretary, assumed the role of quasi-chair person responsible for creating and updating the electronic voting agenda, and the capture and dissemination of electronic communication.

In brief, this is how the “virtual” collection committee (CC) works:

Once a collection has a completed acquisition proposal entered into our database by the proponent curator or archivist, conservator and discipline collections manager the registrar posts it to the excel spreadsheet “voting list”, serving as an agenda. The contained fields include the discipline of the collection, registration number (unique number created by our collections management system), the name of the donor or collection, a summary description, the name of the collection proponent, and voting boxes for each committee member. This spreadsheet, posted at the beginning of a month, to a common drive, is accessible to CC members. If a CC member has a question about a given collection this is sent via email to the proponent cc’ing all the other CC members. The response is therefore sent back to the committee as a whole. This replaces in-person discussions regarding the collections. The registrar copies all such questions and answers, as well as general CC member comments, pastes them into a Word document which forms which, along with the voting list/agenda forms part of the permanent record of decision.

The voting list/agenda is a “living” document; as collections are readied for review they are added by the registrar for the first three weeks of the month, where after, the agenda is closed and the registrar tallies and posts the results.

Advantages of the new model include the following:

• Voting is flexible – can be done when time permits
• The process is Greener – no paper is involved
• Collection advocate responses to CC member questions can be thought out and clearly presented – rather than being “off the cuff” in a regular meeting. In addition these questions and answers can be saved in whole. I traditional meetings the minutes contain only a synopsis of the discussions. Some subtle and compelled points may accidentally be omitted.
• There are no minutes to write up.
• Time for travel between offices and the meeting room is saved as well as wasted time waiting for a meeting to start as well as through social engagement during and after the meeting. This easily amounts to an hour savings in itself.

Disadvantages of the new model include the following:

• Using only email communication reduces the dialogue related to each acquisition and there can be more communication in less time in a face to face meeting.
• Important opportunities to discuss important spin off issues that arise from collections discussion such as policy and procedures are lost.
• Some members find the depersonalization of the process discomforting – we need to come together face-to-face as a group.
• Since voting is done in a staggered manner there is a possibility a CC member may be influenced by viewing the vote of a respected colleague.
• Registrars tracking time is greater.

I am the first to admit, as designer of the system, that the net time savings is relatively nominal. However, a gain of an hour and a half a month is helpful and if others look at internal processes with the same view of saving an hour or so a month soon we have an addition day of time savings. Unfortunately, this doesn’t reduce our workload and give us more free time, it simple means we don’t have to work so onerously hard tackling this workload.

I end with a quote from the famous mid-twentieth century American actor and radio announcer Edgar Bergen: “Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance.”

This post is also available in Italian, translated by Marzia Loddo.