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 ...

The new edition of “Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections” is in the making but not done. In fact, this post finds me bowed over my revising notes and frantically typing in all I have missed last time. Time to open up the conversation, show you what I have done so far and comparing notes with you, ...

Fall is the season for conferences and this year I will be at Gallery System’s Collective Imagination in Washington D.C. from November 13 to 17. I am excited to meet a lot of registrars, collections managers, and other people involved in museum documentation there. Of course, I will speak about managing previously unmanaged collections, this ...

EODEM 1.0, the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model, was officially released on September 1st. But why should you, a registrar, be excited about those five letters? Isn’t it just another standard in a museum world that doesn’t lack standards – but is short of people, money, time, and, every so often, the institutional buy-in to ...

Aberdeen South Breakwater Head Lighthouse (built 1815), picture by Jamie McLennan via Pixabay Just a short update: Work on the next edition of “Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections” has begun. I start with doing a complete read-through, marking passages that are outdated, clumsily worded (I often used “he or she” which will now become “they”, for example), ...

As a former collections manager it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that if you leave a blog mainly unattended for nearly 4 years it gathers dust. Well, not real dust, more… virtual dust? Google discontinued its RSS subscription management service and it took me a while to discover that the updates weren’t delivered via mail ...

What do you want to see in it? It has been seven years since “Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections” first saw the light of day. Rowman & Littlefield kindly asked me if I want to do a new edition and I am inclined to shout: “Heck, yeah!” But it has been a long while since the first edition ...

Dear readers, accidentally, a test post was sent out earlier today. It was a post set up to experiment with the functionality of this site and, well, yes, it still works. I set it to a date in the future years ago and apparently, the future is today. So, sorry about that! I suspect this is some ...

It is my sad duty to inform you that on March 25, exactly 11 years after his father, 4 days after his 51st birthday, my colleague, partner, soulmate and best friend Bernd passed away, suddenly and unexpected. I’m in the process of recollecting myself and at the moment I can’t carry on taking care of ...

From 15th until 17th of April 2019 the specialized congress FOCUS: museum takes place at the archaeological state museum in Brandenburg an der Havel. This year is all about depot arrangement and collection management. In numerous speeches, case studies and discussion formats the three-day congress at the Paulikloster in Brandenburg an der Havel is devoted to ...

The days around Christmas are usually a bit calmer and easy going than the rest of the year. For me, it’s traditionally the time to tidy up my room and prepare for the upcoming year. I usually end up with a lot of boxes, one saying “projects in the works” for things I started off ...

Professional association gets the award endowed with 2,200 Euro On the 8th of November 2018 the award “Riegel – KulturBewahren. Preis für Schutz, Pflege und Ausstellen von Kunst- und Kulturgut” (The Lock Bar – Preserving Culture. Award for safeguarding, caring and exhibiting of art and cultural heritage) was granted. The award that comes with an endowment ...

I’m all excited that I was chosen to speak at the European Registrars Conference in London, taking place November 17-19 (see full program here: http://www.erc2018.org/programme/programme/ ). I will represent the TECHNOSEUM (www.technoseum.de) and speak on “Collections management by the truckload” or how to get a grip on large collections. Time to share with you all ...

It’s been a hot summer in many regards. Temperatures were ridiculously high in Germany and while some places saw exceptional drought and wildfire, others saw heavy rain and thunderstorms. It’s nearly a metaphor for my working life. There were the usual ups and downs in collections management, aggravated by the problematic weather conditions. Then, there ...

“After five years you can consider a project as grown-up.” This was more or less how the moderator at the conference of the documentation group of the Deutscher Museumsbund (German Museum Association) phrased it when I gave a talk about our project. In many regards, I think that’s right. But on the other hand, it ...

The most difficult season for the registrar comes to an end. All the end of year gifts wrapped up, all the loans returned or loan contracts renewed, all the candles replaced with LEDs (seriously, who ever thought mixing real – and usually dry – twigs of pine and fire is a great idea?), the last ...

Collections Stewardship is a newly reorganized professional network of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). The network serves a broad museum community of professionals who advocate for better collections stewardship in museums. Whether your title is Registrar, Collections Manager, Preparator, Collections Technician, or something else, if your interest is collections care, then we’re here for ...

Whenever a member of the Registrar Trek Team Member is attending a conference or a similar event to spread the word about our blog project we usually post a “Registrar Trek goes… (Costa Rica, Helsinki, Milan)” message. Well, this time I am attending a conference that takes place at “my” museum, so I can stay ...

I can’t believe it’s 2017 already! Seems like yesterday that we celebrated the third birthday of our project. 2016 was a strange year after all. For me personally it was highly successful, but in the big picture, it was terrible. Terrorist attacks, wars, conflicts, mockeries of elections,… you name it, we could all have done without ...

A short follow-up to our announcement in September: Now all recordings of the “Getting a Grip on Collections Management” webinar series are available to listen to on the Connecting to Collections Care website, together with the slides and additional materials for download: Webinar 1: Basic Condition Reporting Deborah Rose Van Horn http://www.connectingtocollections.org/basic-condition-reporting/ Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections: A Survival Guide for ...

We are delighted to learn that in April this year the Polskie Stowarzyszenie Inwentaryzatorów Muzealnych, Polish Museum Registrars Association, was founded. They have a blog (http://inwentaryzatorzy.blogspot.de/) and already translated two of our articles into Polish: CIDOC 2016 – W dokumentacji kluczowi są ludzie (“CIDOC 2016 – Documentation is about people” by Angela Kipp) – translated by ...

There’s a great series of free webinars coming up, organized by the Connecting to Collections Care Online Community (http://www.connectingtocollections.org/). The topics are different aspects of collections management, the webinars run always 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (time zone of New York): September 15, Webinar 1: Basic Condition Reporting Deborah Rose Van Horn http://www.connectingtocollections.org/basic-condition-reporting/ September 22, Webinar 2: ...

Dear Registrar Trekkers, I’m all excited that I will present a short paper together with Rupert Shepherd from the National Gallery in London at the CIDOC Conference in Milano. It is called ”Spreading the word: Explaining what Museum Documentation is and why it’s important“. We are part of the ”Introduction to Documentation Standards“ session that is ...

As we are close to the opening of the European Registrars Conference in Vienna, I wanted to send a quick reminder that we are glad to post session reports or general reviews and impressions about the conference at Registrar Trek. We already got some volunteers (thank you so much!) but we also have enough web ...

Yesterday, I was taken by surprise when our library sent me a mail that they had just received their copy of “Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections” and were about to catalog it. Two hours later I received an email from my dear colleague Susanne Nickel with congratulations as she received her copy. Throughout the whole day, ...

Dear readers, sometimes life gets in your way. Due to more important family duties I will not be able to attend the European Registrars Conference in Vienna (more info: http://www.erc2016.at/start.html) next month. As I initially planned to inform you all with session reports I am now looking for volunteers to step up. Who will attend and ...

Ever happened to you? You lose sight of a former colleague or fellow student and then, years later, you stumble upon an awesome project, just to discover that exactly this colleague is involved. When I learned that there will be a kickstarter campaign to reconstruct the first all-metall aircraft, the Junkers J1, I, as a ...

Dear Readers, please accept my apologies that our faithful newsletter informed you about a post that was password protected. This was a mistake, as we are testing our new data logger at the moment and I needed a website to test if we all could have access to our climate dates from all over the world ...

Was it already a year ago we raised our glasses to celebrate the second birthday of our project? Time passes so quickly! It’s been a turbulent and busy year, I guess for all of us. For me as the administrator it was especially packed: in my day job as the collections manager of the TECHNOSEUM ...

I’ve found this amazing video showing how “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” is said in sign language in English, Russian, Dutch, Chinese, Australian, Japanese, Finnish, Austrian, Hungarian, Swedish, French, American and German: In the spirit of this video, let’s overcome all barriers! The whole Registrar Trek Team wishes you a merry Christmas and a ...

At the beginning of this year I asked you all if you were willing to join me in the journey of writing a book about managing previously unmanaged collections. And you did. Many of you were willing to support the project with stories, photos, comments, thoughts and encouraging remarks. So today, I can proudly announce that ...

I was quite surprised when I realized that Rupert Shepherd (@rgs1510 ) nominated our project (or its English twitter branch @RegistrarTrek) in the #TwitteratiChallenge. Reading his blog post about it I learned that he was as surprised by his own nomination like I am now. Once recovered from the shock, Helen (@crazymuseumlady) nominated us in ...

Dear Readers of this Registrar Trek Blog, For the last three years we’ve seen a growing number of faithful readers who not only read, but also contribute by sharing the articles, writing comments and sparking conversation with their peers. Some even wrote stories and articles for this blog. That’s great! Today, I want to share with you ...

Good news: we are entering the third year of Registrar Trek! So, after we looked back on a tremendous year 2014 recently, what does 2015 have in store? It’s always hard to tell if you don’t have a crystal ball to look into. Well, and if we had one in our collection as registrars, would we ...

One year has passed since last Christmas? I can’t believe it! It seems like yesterday since the last season’s greetings. This year we have seen loads of incredible stuff at Registrar Trek: We’ve solved a Trilemma, attended the European Registrars Conference, added loads of great stuff to our toolkit (for example how to store buttons), ...

Things are busy right now, so you might realize we are not as quick with adding new material the next few weeks. There are various reasons, including that there was a major server issue with deleted webspace that forced me to backup to a previous version (some might have realized we were offline a few ...

I’m all excited. Last week I got the call that I will do a session at the European Registrar Conference 2014 in Helsinki! See the programme here: http://www.confedent.fi/erc-2014/programme/ The session will be called: The Next Generation: Registrar Blogs and Virtual Networks I’m happy that Registrar Trek author Derek Swallow will join me and I hope to meet some other ...

Storify by Registrar Trek DE Mon, Mar 03 2014 10:02:32 A Tweet a Day Keeps Museum Documentation Ready to Play! Most work done behind the scenes in a museum is not visible to the public eye. But there is one field that is literally invisible: good museum documentation! Rupert Shepherd @rgs1510 Museum documentation manager @HornimanMuseum started an initiative: Add to ...

Great CIDOC-Conference is coming up in September. For those of you who haven’t read it before: Dear Colleagues, The call for papers deadline for CIDOC Conference 2014 has been extended till 20th March. “Access and Understanding – Networking in Digital Era” The annual conference of CIDOC, the International Committee for Documentation of ICOM, will take place from 6th ...

On January 2nd 2013 we started a project with the purpose to inform the public about collections work and bring collections people around the world together. Now, a year later, we are a team of four authors and 32 translators from 19 countries, providing 16 languages. I guess you, our faithful readers, are more interested ...

The special exhibition area is abandoned. Where only half an hour ago artifacts were put into racks or cleaned by conservators, everything is quiet. The last working day before Christmas. Usually, that’s the day to arrange papers and thoughts, review the past year, look ahead to upcoming projects and share some of these thoughts with ...

There are good days and there are bad days. This is a bad, sad day. A day I hoped would never come – or if it did, then in the far, far future when Registrar Trek is a myth the old registrars tell the young registrars about. This project started out as a project of two ...

On July 8 we called out to the world that we are in need of translators. The reaction was overwhelming. When we called out we were four authors Matthew Leininger, Anne T. Lane, Fernando Almarza Rísquez and myself and three translators, Liliana Rêgo, Araceli Galán and Georgia Flouda. Within one and a half week our little ...

Hi there! Seems we missed celebrating the first half year of Registrar Trek due July 1st and the 200th subscriber to our feeds! Well anyway, never too late to celebrate, so Cheers to all our faithful visitors out there! As you can see, you come from all parts of the world: registrars, collections managers, curators of collections, students ...

On January 2nd we started off with a weird idea: A platform to connect registrars around the world. Now, three months later it’s time for a first review. Now, what does the map say? We see where the visitors of Registrar Trek in March 2013 came from: North America: 1165 Europe: 426 South America: 94 Oceania: 84 Middle America (including Mexico): ...