So, yesterday we took a backup of our TMS database. Today, we learn how to restore it. This is also a check you should be doing after having taken your first backup and also regularly after you have taken backups because like I have mentioned here otherwise you can’t be sure you have backed up anything. Or, like a friend of mine who deals with a lot of IT messes put it:
“I bought a book!” “Are there words inside it?” “Huh? Of course. I didn’t check, but there are always words inside a book, right?”
Before you haven’t checked, you just assume, you aren’t sure. And if there is one rule every collections professional knows by heart it is this: Never assume, always make sure!
Step 1: Again, log into the server you want the database to restore to and open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
Go to the folder “Databases”, right-click on it and select “Restore Database…”
Step 3: Chose your backup file
Up comes a rather bleak screen:
Go to “Device” and click on the three dots …
You get another rather bleak screen from which you choose “Add…”
You are getting a look at your file system from which you select the backup file you want to restore from. You might remember I cautioned you to store it in a place you can easily find it in Step 6 in in the previous article, right?
When you have found the right file, you click “OK”.
On the next screen you also click “OK”.
Step 4: Restore your database
Now you are on this screen again, but now it is populated with your chosen backup, including the date and time it would restore to:
You can see how my database “Leer” (yours might be called “TMS” or something else) is showing up both as the source and as the destination. If you really want to overwrite your current database this is fine, for example because something went horribly wrong with your current database and you want to restore it to an older version.
But if you just want to test if our backup file is okay, you don’t want to do that! Imagine something went wrong with the backup. We would be overwriting our totally fine current database with a corrupted backup! Big mistake!
So, for testing, instead of the “Leer” as destination I simply typed another name. I chose “TMSTEST”:
Then I clicked “OK”.
The database will now be restored to a new destination. If the backup file is okay and you have enough storage space you will get this screen after a while:
You can now click “OK”.
Step 5: Test your database
You should now see an additional database in your databases folder (mine shows up, of course, as “TMSTEST” because I called it that way):
If that worked fine, your backup file is okay. But just because I am a bit anal about my data, just to check, just to make sure, I run the mother of all TMS queries: “Select * From Objects”.
Only when it runs smoothly and the number of objects I get back matches my expectations, I am satisfied.
Housekeeping
Backup files are rather large. Which is logical, because they contain all your valuable data, right? So, after testing to make sure my backup is okay, I deleted that new database again by right-clicking on TMSTEST and choosing “Delete” so it doesn’t clog my server:
Also, because the backup files are so large, I tend to compress them before I move them to a different server. I use the software 7-Zip for it since it proved to be rather reliable (https://www.7-zip.org/). If you don’t have it on your server, you need to install it, first.
Go to your Windows Explorer and find your backup file. Right-click on it, choose “7-Zip” and select the option “Add to [whatever your backup is called].7z”.
You can now see how the backup is compressed. Wait until it is done (fetch a coffee or a tea, this might take a while, depending on the size of your database).
After it is finished, you will see a second file on your file system:
You will notice how much smaller the compressed file is. This is much easier to move to another server, unpack, and restore there, right?
Because I am paranoid I will move the .7z file to a cloud storage that I trust now and try if I can unpack it there without issues. If that is the case I can go back and delete the .bak file and just retain the smaller .7z file.
Take your backups, take them to a safe location, and take good care!
This is a step-by-step guide on how to backup your database if you are using a product of The Museum System (TMS) by Gallery Systems. If you use a different system it will work differently. Ask your vendor about it.
Step 1: Log into your database server and open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
You usually find it fastest if you start typing “SQL Server Management…” into the Windows search box.
Step 2: Enter your credentials
You will be prompted to enter your login credentials. If you are on NT Authentication usually all you have to do is click on “Connect”. If you have another form of authentication you will have to enter those login details. Your IT will tell you what to enter in that case.
Step 3: Find your database
In the tree hierarchy, open the folder “Databases” and find your database. It is usually called something like “TMS”. In my case it is called “Leer”.
Step 4: Navigate to the backup menu
Right click on your database, choose “Tasks” and then “Back Up…”
If that option is greyed out, you might not have the rights to do this. in which case you should talk to your IT so you get those rights.
Step 5: Chose your backup method
You will get to this screen:
Here you can choose if you want to do a full or differential backup (we talked about that here). You select that in the drop-down “Backup type”. We chose “Full” for this backup.
As a destination, usually “Disk” is fine, since you probably want to have the backup on your computer first and then transfer it to a cloud later.
Sometimes you will see a backup file already in the screen below that. If that’s the case, remove it, first.
Then click on “Add…”
Step 6: Add the file you want to back up to
By default, Microsoft suggest a rather cryptic sub-folder for your backups. I’d recommend adding a folder in a more prominent place that you can easily find and back up to there. You can see mine being “M:\Backups”.
Enter a file name for your backup. This can be the date you took it (Best Practice is to note the date in a year-month-day format so you can easily sort by date if you have multiple backup files) or a significant pointer to when you took it, for example “BeforeUpgradeTo995” if this is your backup before upgrading to a new version. Don’t forget to add “.bak” as a file ending, otherwise you might run into difficulties to restore it, later.
You can see that I called mine “AfterCI2025.bak” because it is the backup I took after adding a significant amount of information from our user conference.
Once you entered the name, hit “OK”.
Step 7: Take your backup
After that you just need to click on “OK” and your backup will be taken. If you have enough disc space in your chosen location, all is fine, otherwise it will throw an error message.
As collections professionals we are trained to think about security. We constantly make sure that nothing gets damaged and lost, may it be in our own storage or while on loan, perhaps traveling from continent to continent for a new exhibition. But when it comes to data security we often rely on our IT departments and database managers. In a changing world we need to add data security to our registrar’s toolkit because if we don’t care about it, perhaps no one will be left to care about it. So, I am planning on writing a series of short articles on that topic.
Now, I am not an IT expert by any means. I am basically pulling together what I have learned over the years, drawing from resources I have at hand, ready to stand corrected and update you if something I wrote could be done better, easier, and/or more secure. I am thinking in this day and age, any guidance and ideas on how to safeguard our intellectual heritage is better than doing nothing at all. Feel free to contribute with your own sources and ideas.
I am starting with what I feel most comfortable writing about: Backups.
How often should I back up my database?
This is a risk analysis: How serious will losing all your data since you backed up the last time be? In some cases, once a week can be sufficient if you are the only person who works with it, you have all your changes tracked in another medium (for example written notes on paper), and you don’t enter more than just a few records a day. But if multiple people enter and change data during the day? Well, once a day seems highly recommendable, then.
What is the difference between full backup and differential backup?
A full backup stores ALL data of your database. A differential backup only records the changes to the last time you did a full backup. Which one to use when is about analyzing the risks associated with it. A database can get compromised without you noticing right away. In this case it is good if you can revert back to a full backup of an earlier stage, before it became corrupted and then try to extract the data that was added at a later stage from the other backups.
What backup method should I choose and how many backups shall I retain?
There are no hard rules and usually it is best to talk to experienced users of the same collections management system and to the vendor about what makes sense in your use case.
My rule of thumb: If I know I am entering more than ten records each day and do a lot of updating of other records, I will go with a differential backup every day and a full backup once a week. I will keep the backup of the last five days and a full backup from each of the previous four weeks.
But this is tailored for the case where only I enter data and nobody else. If you have a lot of people entering data there are more options of something going wrong, therefore you will want to do backups more often. This is of course also a question of how much storage space you can afford, but then again, you have to factor in the costs of losing data and the hours it takes to re-enter it. Do a proper risk analysis for your institution, then set up a fitting backup routine.
Where shall I store my backup?
Storing your database backup on the same computer you took it is as good as having not stored it at all! When your computer is destroyed either physically pr by a virus, you will have lost both your original database AND your backup.
Best practice is to have three instances of your data:
the original
a backup on site
a backup offsite
A cloud storage might be a good idea for the latter. In this day and age, maybe even a cloud storage outside of your own country. That way, if you are forced to delete data from your database (if this sounds like a far-fetched idea, let me remind you of this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/07/military-images-trump-dei) your data will still be somewhere safe and unchanged.
You can also use an external hard drive that you store somewhere safe, preferably outside of the town or city your original database is situated because if there is a catastrophe in this area, your data might still be safe somewhere else. It has the advantage that you pretty much can control where your data goes and that it can’t be hacked, but the disadvantage is that if something happens to that hard drive, the data is lost.
In comparison, a cloud usually has its own backup routines that make sure that your data is safe. Ask the provider about it. Also ask them about their security measures and what data they share with third parties. Only you should have access to your data, nobody else.
Heads up: Make sure your data is actually backed up!
Just because you have taken a backup doesn’t necessarily mean you have a working backup. Once you have created a backup file, try if you can restore it. Caution: Restore it to a separate space, don’t use it to restore your actual database because you risk damaging a working database with a corrupted backup. Check this regularly and don’t assume that just because you can see a backup file on your drive your data is actually fine.
Final thoughts on when to delete backups
As said before, it is good to retain some backups because not all problems are discovered right away and it might take weeks to discover them. This is about keeping your current data safe and retrievable.
But you also might want to preserve the state of your current research. In the future, you might want to come back and compare how facts were recorded in 2024 and how that changed going forward. Your past records may become sources for future scientists and historians. So, it might be a good idea to take a backup NOW and keep that backup in a safe space for the future.
In these past few weeks it seems that there were so many horrible things happening that just making a list of them feels overwhelming and exhausting. Some of the decisions of the current U.S. government have an impact on the global level, others hit people personally, some of whom are close friends. And then, there are those who seem to target the very core of our profession, like the shutting down of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the termination of grants already awarded by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH).
It is hard not to lose all hope in this climate. And yet, aren’t we, as museum professionals, used to things not really looking pretty? Haven’t we battled budget and staff cuts before? Haven’t we brought uncomfortable truths in front of the eyes of our visitors and politicians before? Maybe the current crisis is not comparable to what we were confronted with before. But just as well, we are well trained in going against adversarial circumstances.
We have always done so with resilience, creativity, and, most of all, a sense of community. We might be spread out across the world and we might have spread ourselves thin by taking on too many responsibilities, but we are not alone. I have reached out to my network over the past few days to check in on some people, see how they are coping, and getting ideas of what can be done, because, in the end, focusing on what can’t be done never made anything better.
A ninja sitting at a desk, typing away on a laptop.
Turns out that John E. Simmons had already started collecting what can be done to prepare for what is coming at us in something we registrars love: A list.
I contributed a few of my thoughts to it and we also asked some more colleagues to add to it. What I am posting here today is by no means a comprehensive and finalized list of what to think about and what to do, but it is a start. Feel free to add more ideas in the comments section, just like we enhance it going forward.
What Can We Do?
1. Apply the lessons that museums learned from Covid
A museum should have a plan for suddenly shutting down or having to reduce staff for a prolonged long period of time.
The plan should include cross-training for all staff so that a reduced staff can keep the institution functioning and care for the collections. Every staff member should be trained to do tasks that are normally not part of their duties so that they can help in the event of a prolonged emergency.
The plan should include what the museum can do to remain a destination for visitors during a crisis. This might include regulating the number of visitors in the museum at the any one time during a pandemic, reducing or eliminating admission fees for visitors during a prolonged financial crisis, and how responsibilities could be handled by a reduced staff. It is worth noting that a recent study revealed that art museums that charge admission spend an average of $100 per visitor but attract smaller audiences than free museums, and that there are costs associated with collecting admission fees that may not be recovered by the fee. Details can be found at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/us-museums-visitors-report-2622358).
2. Prepare the collections for long-term, low maintenance storage
by preparing the most sustainable and passive storage environment possible:
Improve the effectiveness of the collection storage furniture, containers, and supports to protect the collections (e.g., replace gaskets on doors, eliminate acidic materials, reduce lighting and UV in storage).
Keep the collection in order (each object in its proper place in storage) at all times (do not allow a backlog of out-of-place objects to build up).
Improve environmental controls and environmental monitoring procedures.
Maintain storage environment equipment in good order (e.g. replace filters, service equipment regularly, replace aging HVAC systems).
3. Protect the databases
Make sure that you have a fully up-to-date, readable copy of all important museum databases stored somewhere outside of the building, preferably in a hard format as well as electronic.
Make sure that both on-site and off-site databases are protected so they cannot be accessed by unauthorized personnel. Renew passwords and other project on a frequent, regular basis.
If the institution is forced to close, and you have a good backup copy, consider removing databases from the museum servers to protect confidential information.
When possible look into storing backup copies of your databases that are not only readable in a proprietary format of one vendor (who might be forced to hand your sensitive data over or might go out of business). If you database allows for it, export your important data as SQL tables or as comma separated values (.csv). Excel formats such as xlsx, xls, or ods are fine, too.
When possible move your sensitive data to trusted servers outside the U.S. that don’t belong to U.S. based companies who might be forced to hand your sensitive data over or delete your data.
As a rule of thumb: make access to your data for your trusted staff as easy as possible, but make deleting data from your database hard by setting up a robust rights management and whenever possible enable procedures to revert to earlier data entry points.
4. Update the institutional emergency preparedness plan
to include procedures for coping with sudden, prolonged shutdowns of the building.
5. Stock up on critical supplies
6. Download anything needed from federal websites
(such as the NPS Museum Handbook and Conserve O Grams or IMLS reports) immediately, while the information is still available. Store this data in a safe place that is only accessible to authorized personnel and make deleting those resources as hard as possible.
7. Keep in mind that most serious problem going forward will probably not be the cuts in federal funding
to the NIH, NEA, NSF, IMLS, etc., because most of this money goes to projects which can be postponed or funded by other sources (such as donations). The most serious problem will be the lack of funds resulting from damage done to the economy due to a combination of the rising deficit, increasing unemployment (e.g., the mass reductions in the federal workforce and corresponding loss of jobs in sectors that serve the federal workforce), and decreased tax revenues due to tax cuts for the wealthy, tariffs on imports, and cuts to social services. In other words, the predicted problems with the US economy are far more likely to be a bigger problem for museums than the loss of federal grant funds.
8. Reach out to your community and build strong networks
Let your community know that you need their support now more than ever.
Let them know that most small museums in their immediate area do not get federal funds directly, but do get support from their state humanities councils. Membership for these museums is usually less than $30 a year and they put the money to good use.
If you have lost funding from IMLS or NEH, let your community know. Here’s an example from a small museum explaining exactly what was lost: “The termination of the NEH grant award and the loss of $25,000 are devastating for the Weston History & Culture Center. This funding was going to support our upcoming permanent exhibit…”
The people caring about your museum can write and phone their representatives to let them know they are not okay with what is happening right now.
Reach out to your colleagues in your area but also around the world. Local networks will make it easier to help each other out with supplies and hands-on tasks. Colleagues in other countries might be able to provide a safe space for your vulnerable data and might have had to deal with similar circumstances in the past, so might be able to contribute with knowledge and creative solutions.
Words of Cheer:
Museums existed long before the IMLS and other federal granting agencies, so they can survive this period, although many worthy projects and much research will be halted unless alternative funding can be found.
With preparation, museums can survive the coming crisis as they have survived other crises. There will be staff reductions and loss of opportunities, but with any luck, the situation will change within a few years.
Take a good look at your policies and procedures and investigate new laws and executive orders you are confronted with. Laws that are passed in a great hurry often contain contradictions and loopholes. Often asking for clarifications by authorities can slow processes down and work to your advantage. Often stalling a process in good faith can be much more effective than open opposition which puts you and your staff at risk.
Be prepared to be patient. Lawsuits and judicial decisions challenging the proposed changes will take time to go through the courts.
In the longer term, climate change and its effects on museum operations, the economy, and the behavior of the public is the greatest challenge to the future of museums, so the present crisis should be used to prepare for the future.
Best Advice:
If your institution does not have a plan for long-term survival during a financial crisis, the next pandemic, or climate change, get busy now to correct this deficit.
Snider, Julianne. 2024. The Wheel is Already Invented: Planning for the Next Crisis. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 20(2):347-359, DOI: 10.1177/15501906241232309
Christopher J. Garthe (2023)—The Sustainable Museum. How Museums Contribute to the Great Transformation (Routledge)
Some more notes
Share this resource freely with anyone you think needs to see this, no need to ask for permission. Add what applies to your special case. Let us know what we should add. Download, save, print, circulate.
Registrar Trek is hosted on a server in Germany and following EU laws. I am currently looking through all the plug-ins I use to make sure none of them collects and shares any personal data with the U.S. Or, in fact, anybody. I always was mindful not to collect any personal information but will double-check again if everything is safe.
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!
Angela
A project to break down language barriers and connect registrars worldwide
