Museum professional, lover of all collections work, former collections manager of the TECHNOSEUM in Mannheim, Germany. Now Professional Services Specialist for Gallery Systems. Independent museum professional.
Cat wrangler and #SciFi enthusiast.
Views are my own. Of course, they are. I can't make anybody responsible for the garbage my brain produces!
When I first saw pictures from the project “Skeletons in the Closet” by Klaus Pichler, I was overwhelmed. Somebody did something I and certainly many of my colleagues have often thought about: someone should take a picture of THAT. The beautiful and absurd compositions that appear when collections and everyday museum work meet. Cautiously, I asked the photographer from Vienna if we are allowed to post a text and some pictures from the project. The answer was really positive: Not only that this was no problem, he would also write a text about how it was like to work together with the registrars! Enjoy!
More than four years have passed since my first photo appointment for my photo series ‘Skeletons in the Closet’ in the non-public parts of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Nevertheless, I can remember my first trip to the basements, depots and storage rooms of the museum like it was yesterday.
Some words on my personal history: I grew up on the countryside and whenever my family made a trip to Vienna I insisted in visiting the Natural History Museum. According to that, the fact that I, as a grown-up, was allowed to take pictures in the ‘private’ spaces of the museum has some kind of sentimental value.
Back to topic: the first visit to the backstage area was fascinating. Think of childhood memories of visits to exhibitions, think of the film ‘Night at the Museum’ or Noah’s Ark with its doors just opened. Animals next to animals, shoulder to shoulder, frozen in their actions, dead, but alive nevertheless. And, amidst of that: the registrars, who guided me through the taxidermied herds with great knowledge and were familiar with every corner of the giant storage facilities. Without them, I probably would still be in the basements of the museum, lost in the roomy corridors.
It is still vivid in my imagination, with how much anticipation they unlocked the doors of a room we have not been before, knowing which special sights were waiting behind the doors. I also remember how quick all my questions were answered by them, no matter how detailed my question were, and their enthusiasm about answering my questions. I often got the impression that the registrars had built up a very close relationship with the exhibits and were enjoying the time amidst their ‘family’, sometimes four levels below ground.
I was impressed by the registrars’ pride about a specific exhibit, for example a Blue Buck, which is extinct since a long time and only present as a handful of exhibits worldwide. Or the eagerness of some retired registrars who voluntarily spent their time with refurbishing the herbaria of the botanic department.
All I can say is that my whole photo series would only have half its size when not getting a thousand hints and suggestions from the registrars, where to search for special exhibits or where to find photogenic corners of the museum. And I am now using the opportunity of writing a text addressed to registrars to say a heartfelt ‘thank you!’ to the registrars who have guided me through my project.
Klaus Pichler
Book: ‘Skeletons in the Closet’, photos by Klaus Pichler, texts by Klaus Pichler, Julia Edthofer and Herbert Justnik, english edition, will be released on June 15 2013, limited to 750 copies (numberd by hand), hardcover, hardbound, 112 pages, 63 pictures. Price: € 30,- plus P & P. Can be ordered via the homepage of Klaus Pichler.
What initially started “Registrar Trek: The Next Generation” was Fernando and me writing an article about registrar’s work. Without knowing from the other, coming from two different paths, in fact, from two different continents and backgrounds. Fernando published them side by side in the conversemos sobre section of the ILAM website. Now, we have taken again the opportunity to work on a topic from two different sides: Fernando on the registration of contemporary art, Bernd and me on the registration of technological objects. Two paths, one destination: to exchange thoughts and to inspire our colleagues. Registering furniture and appliances: contemporary art (video-sculptures, multimedia, installations) Fernando Almarza Rísquez
With the typical humor of a registrar we could introduce the amusing but serious working hypothesis that registering some contemporary art involves dealing with appliances and furniture. But actually, the artist’s talent has found new ways that transcend the search for originality and pleasure of modern art and modifies them into other, dynamic forms of sensitivity, communication and stimulation of the senses. So let’s reformulate the hypothesis: these artistic approaches are much more than furniture and appliances. Ergo, to register these works is much more than documenting furniture and appliances. Read more… Appliances, furniture and beyond – registering technological objects Angela Kipp, Bernd Kießling
When you work as a registrar you often take for granted that you know what other registrars in other museums do. But when you talk to colleagues from different museum types you often realize that some things are similar and other things are very different. When Fernando told us he was preparing an article on the registration of contemporary art, we accepted the challenge to write one on the registration of technological objects. So, if you are into the arts: let us unfold to you the wonderland of technology. If you are into technology: Look over our shoulders and tell us if we forgot something important. Read more…
When you work as a registrar you often take for granted that you know what other registrars in other museums do. But when you talk to colleagues from different museum types you often realize that some things are similar and other things are very different. When Fernando told us he was preparing an article on the registration of contemporary art, we accepted the challenge to write one on the registration of technological objects. So, if you are into the arts: let us unfold to you the wonderland of technology. If you are into technology: Look over our shoulders and tell us if we forgot something important.
Registering technological objects: a look on the surface
Blaupunkt Florida from 1954/55 (picture: Eckhard Etzold)
When registering a classical artwork, you normally know the artist and the date of the artwork. You can measure the dimensions and register the technology used in the classical way: oil on canvas, watercolor, lithography… Most of these things can be easily seen with one’s eye, given you have the proper knowledge and training in art history and techniques used by artists – and the whole process of accessioning has gone right. Granted, when something went wrong and you don’t know who painted the artwork, things can become tricky. Then you have to get your registrar’s and art historian’s senses together and start to investigate.
When registering technological objects, that’s just the beginning. Let’s take a simple ancient radio. It has a manufacturer and if you are lucky it is written on the device. It might also come with a type label that provides additional information. If you are very lucky, this label shows the year of construction. But that’s not often the case. So you go and look for old radio catalogs and try to find this type of radio. If you have a good library of ancient mail order catalogs and catalogs for radio retailers you have a good chance to find the year, or more likely years of construction.
If you have no manufacturer and no type label, which isn’t uncommon, the catalogs are also a great place to start your research. Of course, you should have a certain idea from which time span a radio is, otherwise you will have to dig through decades of catalogs. That’s where the art sphere comes in. You can vaguely estimate the years of construction by looking at the design of a radio. But this can fool you, too. For example:
Braun Kleinsuper SK2 built similar from 1955 to 1960 (picture: Nite_Owl)
Manufacturer BRAUN developed an incredible clear and functional design, inspired by the Bauhaus movement and in parts developed by professors and students of the famous Ulm School of Design as early as 1955. If you look at certain radios from this period, you would swear they were made deep in the 1960’s. At the same time manufacturers like Grundig produced radios that look a bit like neo-baroque (although, if you take a look at Braun’s SK61 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Braun-Sk61.jpg and Grundig’s SO271 http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/grundig_so271_barock.html both built in 1961 it’s hard to stay neutral and to suppress the urge to tag the latter under „monstrosity“).
So, what do you enter in the data base? In the first place you enter the manufacturer and then, in some rare case, where you can figure it out, the designer. A little upside down situation to the arts world, where it’s common that you have the artist in the first place and only in some cases an additional manufacturer, most commonly a printer.
Staying with the dates: for our design approach can lead us off the track, it’s safer to stay with technology. It gives us great hints to stay in the right era. Some manufacturing techniques are labor-intensive, and therefore point us to early decades: riveting is more labor-intensive than spot-welding, for example. In times of war, economy of scarcity rules and you will realize that on the used materials: a necessity to use materials you don’t have to import and to use as little as possible of them. Speaking of materials, they also give clues for the date: synthetic materials were developed through the last hundred years and are still improved. So were production processes that you can trace on the object: injection molding will leave marks of the ejector on the formed parts, for example. So, the knowledge of materials and technology will help you a great deal in dating the object.
Next, you want to find out where the radio is made. That will be another research. You will most certainly find the place where the manufacturer has his head office but that’s not necessarily the same place he manufactures the radios. Big companies tend to have production places throughout the nation, if not throughout the world. Some might even produce the same radio in different plants. Some might cooperate with other manufacturers so the radio is built in the plant of one manufacturer but has the name of a second manufacturer on it. Much to register…
Easy going: the dimensions
To reach safe ground again we measure the radio. That’s simple. Height, length, depth. But wait! What’s about the cable? It sticks out of the silhouette. If we just measure the dimensions of the box, every showcase maker will be in trouble, because he didn’t know he has to add space for placing the cable. If we measure the maximal dimension with the cable in every direction, we will get ridiculous vast dimensions. If we just fold the cable behind the box and add the measurement to the measurement of depth? Well… someone might re-measure just the box, coming to the conclusion that this can’t be the radio he searches for, because the data differs.
Best solution to this issue – that drove generations of exhibit designers crazy – is to add an information to every measurement. For example: „box“, „cable length“, „measured when closed“ or „with lids open“.
Technical data: A look inside
What about the technical data? In the field of classical arts you can keep it simple and to the point most of the time. „Oil on canvas“ for example includes every technical information you need. You know what to expect, even without seeing the actual picture. As an experienced registrar you can even give a complete catalog of required storage conditions without actually thinking about it.
What is the technical data of an ancient radio? The materials used are wood, metal, glass and most certainly plastics. It might have a textile cover over the loudspeakers, too. And that’s just the outside. When you remove the back board you will find tubes, resistors, capacitors, inductors and cables. So the material list is enhanced with paper, lead, tar, wax, glue and certain kinds of synthetic materials you prefer not to think about too deep (Phenol formaldehyde resin, for example). The capacitors are filled with electrolyte, so you have to deal with liquids as well.
Open backside of a Philco PT-44 Transitone from 1940/41. Can you name all the materials you see?
What are the ideal storage conditions for this material mix? Well, the one thing I can tell you is that there are no ideal storage conditions for this. You can just try to keep the climate stable but you will certainly knock off some bars for some materials.
And what about the techniques used? Well, wood will be sawed and joined, glass will be blown, metal can be pierced, bent, rolled, pressed, welded, spot-welded, riveted, soldered, screwed,… Are you still with me?
So, if you are detail-orientated like most registrars are, you will find many, many things to register. Take into account that each component like an electronic tube has its own manufacturer and year of construction, has its own purpose like amplifier tube or rectifier tube and technical data like voltage and power that separates it from the other components that might look similar at first glance. And this is just a simple radio. You don’t have moving parts like little electric motors and drive belts you will find in a tape recorder. And it’s far, far away from the things a car consists of.
Beyond technical data: the context
Human beings use technology to shape their environment. And vice versa technology shapes human beings. Don’t believe us? Just take a look at people waiting at a bus stop today and try to remember how it was ten years ago. While then they were reading newspapers or books or were staring as life went by, nowadays most people stare at their smartphone. So technology shapes our behavior and this is a fact since the first human discovered that he or she could use a stone as a tool.
Coming back to our radio, the use of this device changed people’s lives. Before its invention, you got news from the newspapers, about a day after they happened. With the invention of radio broadcasts you had the news only a few minutes or hours after they occurred. When radio came up, it was a sensation. There were only few broadcasts, not the 24/7 broadcasts we are used to today. When something was broadcasted, often the whole family would gather around the radio to listen – in the early days every family member with a headphone.
Young child listening to a radio, 1920-1930 (Item is held by John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.)
Manufactured radios were scarce and expensive, so many people started to build radios themselves. It was a tremendous do-it-yourself movement. Manufacturing developed soon and in the 1920’s German manufacturers developed plans to build an affordable radio by sharing costs through standardization. It is often believed that the “Volksempfänger” VE 301 was a development pushed by Hitler, but in fact the plans reach back much further.
After the war the use and role of radio changed. Efforts were made to make the radio a portable device which could be done effectively after the invention of the transistor. When TV came up, it pushed aside radio as the place the family would gather around in the evenings. Listening to the radio became an activity done alongside another, more important activity like cooking, ironing or driving a car. That’s where radio is until now – well, not quite. With internet radio humanity has broken up the limitations of just being able to listen to radio stations within the reach of the own antenna. It was possible to listen to radio stations around the world through short wave even in the earliest radio times, but then it was still necessary to understand the technology involved. The right device, the right length and shape of antenna, propagation conditions… Nowadays you just turn on your little WLAN radio device and flip through a station list that allows you to listen to a country station in the Middle-West, a samba or bossa nova station in Brazil or some traditional music in Mongolia. You don’t need to know how it works, you just need to know how to handle your device (given, some menus are so complicated to understand that you just wish they were as easy and logical as the calculation of a dipole antenna).
How does this help in the registration of our radio? Well, if you have the development history in mind, it’s easier to track down and understand signs you find on the radio.
You might be able to trace the story of a common household appliance: while it might have been the center of family live in the beginning, layers of grease mixed with dust can indicate that it was the kitchen radio after a new and better model or a TV set came to the family. Signs of seams of glasses can indicate it was used frequently to put the drinking glass down, telling you it had a place in the household where one was tempted to do so, maybe the bedroom of a teenager? You might find someone decided to wrap it with self-adherent design foil to give it a fresher outfit in the 1970’s. Or, to the opposite, grounded off the original varnish and painted it over white to make it fit in the modern living room. You might find signs of restoration from the time the model gained collector’s value. Or maybe it is in an incredible good shape, looking just like it came from the plant, because it was held in high esteem over the years.
Self-made radios were common in the ealy days of radio, so was the knowledge of the technology involved. Header of the category “Which wiring do I chose to build?” of the popular German monthly journal “Radio Amateur” (taken from the issue 12/1928)
If you open the backside you might find alterations to the original wiring scheme, done to listen to frequencies originally not intended to be received with that radio. Maybe just because the original owner wanted to receive another allowed frequency, but maybe because he wanted to listen to “forbidden” stations (foreign broadcasts in wartime, for example). You might also find alterations done to insert a different type of tube, because the original one was no longer available or others were cheaper.
It is your responsibility as a registrar to be able to read the signs but also to act as a good investigator. Assumptions have to be marked as such. They can be verified by asking the donor about what he or she can remember about the object. If you are lucky, the radio came with documents: the original invoice, the license to use it or a photo of the proud owner. These documents have to be properly filed and referenced in the data base. If you get additional hints and stories from the donor, they have to be documented as well.
The radio is a part of human history. Maybe a small part but as we are keepers of the cultural heritage we are responsible to keep important information together.
How deep is your registering?
Having read so far you surely feel overwhelmed by information and possible things to register. They all seem important, adding context and meaning to this special object as well as to the history of radios in general. Your observations on this object might indeed be helpful to verify or falsify theories of historians.
The perfect way to store technological objects? Certainly not! But it’s still how some people think it is in the storage of a science and technology museum… (picture: Philip (flip) Kromer from Austin, TX)
But in reality we don’t have as much time to invest in a single object. We have to make decisions on what to register and what not. Especially, as we registrars in science and technology museums are often carrying a burden from the past: For years, the custom in collecting technical objects was similar to how you run a junk yard: You just collect them and pile them in large industrial halls without documentation. Heck, they are just industrial mass products; you can document them sometime in the future, right? Well, we all know that this was not right, that we lost information because of the carelessness of our ancestors. So part of our work is to research and to give the objects in our collections their history back.
So, we have to limit ourselves in the registering of the single object to get more done in the whole collection. Sometime in the future we will write something about how to conduct a “triage” to protect and document as many objects as possible as primary care.
TV storage gone wrong? Nope, we are back in the arts sphere: That’s “Sensory Overload” by Nam Jun Paik (picture: Arti Sandhu)
How deep we go with registering an object is a decision on a by-case basis. For most exhibitions or loans a documentation of basic technical data that can be measured and can be found on a type label is sufficient, along with a rough estimate of the manufacturing time. There are specialized research and exhibition projects that need a more thorough documentation. But then again, that’s where you can use synergistic effects. These projects can have specialized curators and scientists that provide additional data. Or the projects are funded in a way that you can invest more time on detailed registration.
In a way, registering technological objects is squaring the circle: When you register most accurate, you can’t register many objects. If you register not accurate enough you might reach high numbers but produce data base entries that are all but helpful. While “The Night Watch, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1642, oil on canvas” says sufficiently enough, “Radio, BRAUN, 1950-1959, wood” says nearly nothing. So, it’s up to the registrar to find a good middle ground between being too detail-oriented and being too common.
__________________________ Bernd Kießling holds the job title of “Museologe” at the TECHNOSEUM, Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit in Mannheim, Germany. His working area can be compared to the work of a registrar. His areas of expertise are the collections of radio, television, radiocommunication, computer technology, office technology, photography and nuclear technology.
This text is also available in Italian translated by Silvia Telmon.
When you think about registrar’s work I bet most of the time you think about fine arts, archaeological findings or fossils. Lesser known and recognized are sports collections and museums. But, hey, sports and museum? Sounds like a win-win to me. I was glad to meet Antony Aristovoulou who has worked for several sports collections. A registrar’s game seems to be always the same: sort, catalog, data base, crate, store. Not much of a surprise, you just play by the rules. But what happened to Antony was nothing like expecting a grass court and discovering it’s a clay court. It’s like expecting a 100-meter sprint and discovering on the day you show up for the match that it’s an Ironman and you are supposed to do it with your flip-flops on.
My work with the Melbourne Cricket Club Museum/National Sports Museum collection relocation/registration/rehouse was coming to an end and I secured new work with Deakin University’s Centre for Leisure Management Research (CLMR) in December 2006. I was told that as of January 2007, Tennis Australia had a tennis heritage collection which needed to be relocated and registered. The whole kit and kaboodle. At this point I was not told that no foundation work had been made (i.e. off site facility, cms, shelving, etc…). Hell, the contract between the University and Tennis Australia (TA) hadn’t even been finalised yet! So, here I was all proud of myself, thinking I’d finish one job, have Xmas holidays, and after New Years, go straight into a new job. How wrong was I!
Things slowly started getting off the ground from March ’07, where I was taken to a shipping container holding facility. Basically the whole collection was contained in this container – direct from California, U.S.A. This was the private collection of a German ex-pat named Rolf Jaeger, who exhibited them in a private museum in California. They were bought by the then President of TA, Mr. Geoff Pollard, in the hope of kick-starting a Tennis Australia heritage collection, for a new tennis museum based at Melbourne Park. This Jaeger Collection was to complement the historical artefacts held in the offices and storerooms of Melbourne Park. Australia was the only Grand Slam nation which did not have a Grand Slam tennis museum. All the artefacts were stuffed into the container and I knew straight away there be some casualties. My jaw was agape and I was wondering what I had just gotten myself into.
Anyway, my job was not just to do all of the above, but I had to source a storage facility, computer hardware, imaging software and cms, photography equipment, advise on security, shelving. etc…
I got all this done, had the shipping container delivered, and over the course of a few months, slowly sorted through the items. Money became scarce after a short while – I got what I wanted with the facility, computer, cms, and photography equipment, but I didn’t get what I wanted with regards to rehousing materials (acid free boxes, etc..) and shelving ( I got some, but not enough to satisfactorily house all items safely). For many items – the hundreds of racquets in particular – I had to store these in large acrylic containers (with cling wrap across the top) which came in the shipping container, each sitting on wooden pallets. :-/
Nevertheless, everything was tagged, registered, catalogued (Vernon CMS), given locations, photographed and image linked, and, of course, rehoused (to the best of my abilities).
I conducted comprehensive damage reports for the unprotected and minimally protected items coming out of the shipping container, and that was pretty much it.
Oh, no, not quite. I also had to (also unbeknownst to me when I began) manage TA’s non collection excess furniture and Australian Open equipment. These took up a huge amount of the storage space, and it took me months to rearrange all this stuff to condense it and maximise space for the collection, AND, manage it in a way so any dirt and dust from this impacted on the collection as little as possible.
Well, that’s it – as far as I can remember at the time of writing. I don’t know what has happened to the majority of the collection since I finished this project in April 2009, but around a year later, I did see that some of the artefacts I worked with had been loaned to the Kooyong Tennis Club (the former home of the Australian Open), and that was good to see. At least some of the gems i worked with were getting some show time! 🙂
A look on google analytics today revealed an unknown fact: There are registrar’s on the International Space Station (ISS) – or at least people who are watching Registrar Trek! Seems our Blog title isn’t as futuristic as it may seem…
Well, in fact it’s one of googles April Fool’s jokes, but a rather brilliant one, especially as the location moves with the real track of the ISS. Keep watching the stars!
As we are in a nonsense kind of mood today, here is a link to a game called “Must Escape the Museum”. A point and click adventure for the dark side of your registrar personality… you can actually touch those statues, dinosaurs and – to come back to our original topic – space suits. At least the standard mouse pointer is white gloved… Must escape the museum!
As registrars we are all familiar with standards, policies and norms. Recently, I stumbled upon a passage of the German Industrial Norm (DIN) standard DIN EN 15946:2011 for the packing procedures for the transportation of cultural heritage that recommends that the external dimensions of a crate must be smaller than that of the narrowest point which has to be traversed during transport. And that small items should be packaged together if they match and are going to the same destination (you can find the said passage under 5.2.1 “General principles”). My first reaction was an outright: Later on my colleague Anne T. Lane informed me that this might sound like an order from Captain Obvious but is in fact a very wise one:
Since our university museum loading dock is, of course, impossible for a real truck to back into, we often use the neighboring one belonging to the theater department if a full tractor-trailer has to pick up or drop off a shipment. This means we have to haul our crates out through the gallery and through a series of hallways and more doors. Kevin, one of our preparators, was trying to maneuver a crate out of the museum through the double doors but it kept getting stuck. I came over to help and found it was so tight a fit that I had to depress the push bars on the doors on alternate sides. The crate was a fairly standard one of plywood with exterior framing that divided the sides into panels. As the crate went on by the push bars, they snapped back out again once they passed by the framing boards, so I had to keep going back and forth to depress them again until we finally got the thing through. Since my arms aren’t long enough to span the doorway, we had to keep the crate at just enough of an angle to depress one bar while I went over to the other one. If that crate had been 1/2″ larger, we would have had to take it outside and around the building.
All in a day’s fun.
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): 18
Asia: 7
Africa: 3
We guess that means we reach registrars around the world and we can easily spot the areas where the registrar is a known species and where it is still a profession that is scarce.
When we look at the overall visitors from January 2nd to March 29 we have 9,576 visits by 4,453 unique visitors which we think is, well, how should we say it best?…
Roar!
Moving on we hope that you will continue with telling us great stories from your everyday work or about how you became a registrar or write great articles about our profession that we can publish and translate (mail us at story@museumsprojekte.de).
We are grateful to everyone who is willing to translate something into a new language. Just drop us a line if you feel like joining our team.
Recently, I read an email by Alana Cole-Faber, Registrar at the Hawaiian Mission Houses in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. The context doesn’t matter here, but her words were:
„…us who are, literally, isolated. Like, on islands. In the middle of oceans. Where registrars are a strange, endangered breed of animal rarely spotted.“
A registrar in his natural habitat: caring for collections. Thanks to Matt Leininger for the picture.
I was thinking again and again about these words. Alana works on an island, so her words hold especially true for her position, but I found it a brilliant description of our jobs as registrars, collection managers or curators of collections in general.
Sometimes, when I go through the aisles of our outside storage, searching for an artifact that has to go out for a loan and is marked in the database as “location unknown” I can nearly hear the voice of Sir David Attenborough: “The registrar sneaks through the jungle of objects in search of its prey. Some way down the aisle an artifact sits together with some fellows, suspecting nothing. The registrar comes closer. She looks, checks the record and with a short, purposeful snatch grabs the artifact.”
A look at the figures
But joke aside, isn’t it really so that the registrar is an animal rarely spotted? Most of our work is done behind the scenes. So much behind the scenes that we are even out of sight and sometimes even out of mind for most of our colleagues. I started a non-representative survey on certain field-related LinkedIn groups1 to see if my personal experience of the working setup is right. The question was: “As a registrar: What is your normal working setup (more than 50% of your average working time)?” See what I’ve got:
Fortunately, the lone wolves that have to roam their territory all by themselves with no one within reach are not the majority. But, to stay in the picture, registrars don’t form packs. The registrar’s work has to be done alone by 71%.
The hermit in the storage area
Registrars often work concentrated behind the scenes. Thanks to Lisa Verwys for the picture.
How is it like to work all alone? I like to quote a comment2 made by Antony Aristovoulou that throws a light on this: „I rarely received inspections or signs of interest from those who were managing me, and it it became a very lonely process. The artefacts became my friends.“
No-one will deny that it is great to be alone in the storage area from time to time. Working alone as a registrar has an amount of freedom few people can afford nowadays. Depending on the architecture and infrastructure of the storage it might even mean no internet and mobile connection. Separated from the rest of the world, on a lonesome island.
What are the consequences? Well, there are certain dangers. Firstly, the pure, physical ones. There has to be a security concept for the one that works all alone. Generally, the one who is forced to work alone should always have the possibility to call for help and assistance. It should be made sure that it is recognized when he or she gets in a situation where he or she is not able to call for help. Possible ways: A routine in calling him or her by phone to check if everything is alright. A mobile phone that he or she always carries with her / him (given there is mobile-phone reception). A checkup procedure that makes sure he or she doesn’t get locked in a storage area. Extra inspection tours of the security guard. All of this should be organized before someone starts working alone.
But there are other, less obvious dangers in working alone. Chances are high no one thinks about the one that works in the storage area when all go out for lunch. Important information in institutions is often passed on over a cup of coffee during a break. People who don’t get feedback or have the possibility to exchange with their colleagues tend to become solitary. It’s the task of the registrar him/herself to avoid total isolation by taking part in the community of the museum. But it’s also the task of his/her colleagues not to forget the one in the storage area. And last but not least it’s the job of the ones that are responsible for the working organization in the museum to create possibilities of exchange between the staff members. This might be the only way that the registrar becomes not the „strange animal from the storage“ but stays the colleague. Okay, make it „the colleague with the strange job“, but still: the colleague.
The one that spoils the fun
Giving clear directions of what to do and what not is part of the job. Thanks to Zinnia Willits for the picture.
The numbers show why many registrars feel isolated, even within a team. This has much to do with the job the registrar has to perform. He or she has to care for the well-being of the objects in the collection. That includes often saying „no“ when it comes to loans or events within the museum. If the head of the institution wants to have a big party in the galleries, the registrar has to stand his or her ground by saying that this can’t include food and drinks. If the marketing team wants to collect school groups with a historic school bus, the registrar most certainly has to say that this isn’t possible. If a befriended institution wants to borrow a flag and plans to hang it in the entrance of the exhibition without protection, he or she can only shake her head. He or she acts as an attorney for the artifacts, who can’t speak for themselves. Although on paper all staff members are responsible for preserving objects for the future, the buck often stops at the desk of the registrar. But the registrar is not the head of the institution. Usually, he or she is not even the head of the department. This means although the responsibility lies on his or her desk, his or her decision may not be the final one. This adds up to the feeling of being isolated.
For the team members, it is the other way round. Curators have great ideas for upcoming exhibitions. Designers have new ideas how to present the artifacts. Marketing people think intensely on how to attract visitors. And then the registrar comes and just says „no“ to their ideas. Of course, for them it looks like the registrars are strange animals! They are the ones that spoil all the fun! But the painful truth is: that’s the job. If the registrar is lucky, there are also conservators on the team that back up his or her opinion. Otherwise he or she can just point to policies and standards (which is rather boring for the rest of the team) or present cases where it went wrong because nobody listened to the registrar (which is more entertaining, but not necessarily more convincing). In the end, the registrar can’t do more than state his opinion and document the whole process of decision-making to be on safe ground.
An endangered species?
High-quality work is important – and needs enough time and money. Thanks to Sharon Steckline for the picture.
So, is the registrar an endangered species? Well, the registrar might not be more endangered than any other museum professionals today. When money is tight, cultural institutions are the first that are looked upon with a frown by authorities. But as far as I can see, this is not limited to collection management. Politicians tend to ask if a certain museum can be run by fewer people or is necessary at all. In fact, many institutions in countries outside the US just recently realized what registrars are good for and create more jobs in this field. But that’s just one part of the story.
Another part is that quality of our work is really in danger. When money is tight, decisions on where the money should go are hard to make. And often, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Registrars, trained to act as inconspicuous as possible by trade, often are the ones that are not heard in their requests for archival materials and manpower. But again, that’s just one part of the story.
In many smaller museums money is so tight that it’s not the decision between archival boxes for collection management or advertising in the newspaper, it’s the decision between fixing the roof or having an exhibition. In this cases human resources are a big issue3. Here, the position might be called „registrar“ but it comprises much more. He or she might be also the visitor guide, complaint manager, shop assistant, cashier and curator all in one person. This often means that this person can’t invest as much time in collection management as is needed.
Other museums decide they can’t afford a registrar on permanent staff. They will hire freelance registrars when urgently needed. This is a good idea when it comes to planning new storage units, get consulting on how registration should be organized, have the artifacts of a temporary exhibition in safe hands4 or do an inventory on a certain collection. However, if an institution holds a collection that exceeds a certain amount of objects (not easy to draw a line here, this depends as well on the scope of the collection as on how it is „used“ by the institution), collection management is a full-time job. The idea to let a registrar do an inventory on the collection and then have „someone do it along his regular duties“ or „all the staff cares for the collection“ doesn’t work.
Quality in museum work is always a combined effort. Teamwork is the key. Thanks to Matt Leininger for the picture.
A registrar is more than a human data base. If you have all collection items absolutely accurate in your data base (name a museum that has!), this doesn’t mean it stays that way. Keeping track of the objects is a permanent effort. Having everything correct in the data base, too. You can have all staff members swearing an oath to always document every movement of objects in the data base, you will still have St. Entropy messing around in your storage area! A good registrar will have an eye on that. But there’s more to it. Like in every library, some objects get „lost“ by being put in the wrong storage place. A registrar that is familiar with his / her collection will have an idea where to search for it – based on his experience and on the knowledge who handled the object recently. Don’t forget you usually not only contract a registrar – you contract an elephant’s brain! Lastly, a registrar who is in charge of a collection for a long time will somehow merge with his or her collection and storage area. He or she develops something like a sixth sense for things that are wrong: an unusual increase in humidity before someone checked the hygrometer, an object that just doesn’t look the way it always looked, a voice telling the registrar to take a walk around the outside storage hall once again before leaving… That’s something that develops over time. You can’t have it with short-term contracts for only a few months or a year.
Conclusion
As we saw, the registrar is in fact an animal rarely spotted. It is a combined effort not to let it become an endangered animal:
As an individual: all who work in the museum have to take care that the registrar is safe during his time working alone and doesn’t become isolated from the rest of the museum community.
As a professional: all the colleagues need to understand what is the job of the registrar. It’s not that he or she wants to spoil the fun, it’s his or her job to protect the objects so others can enjoy them in the future, too.
As a museum: authorities should think in-deep about the value of professional collection management. It is an old hat that preventive conservation and professional storage saves costs in the long run. Cutting budgets here might result in higher costs later.
As a society: politics, communities and tax-payers in general should think about the value of museums and their collections. We all know that a person that loses his memory will lose himself. It’s the same with a society that loses its history. Preserving our heritage is not only a cost factor, it has high value for a society.
Just my two cents on this issue. Now, I got to go, I need to roam my territory, I think I spotted some undocumented objects further down that aisle…
Angela Kipp
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Association of Registrars and Collection Specialists, Collections Management and Collection Preservation and Care, dates collected from 01/27 until 02/23/2013 ↩
Comment made concerning the survey posted in the Association of Registrars and Collection Specialists Group on www.LinkedIn.com ↩
I strongly recommend to have a registrar in the exhibition team when doing an exhibition that contains a certain amount of artifacts. See my article „5 tips for dealing with registrars“ https://world.museumsprojekte.de/?p=24↩
Recently, I got to know Eduardo De Diego, PSP from Applied Security Research Associates, based in Canada. Security is always a big issue in museums and I enjoyed his insights in moving collections. Naturally, I told him about our blog. I asked him if he had a good story to tell. Of course he had (and I sincerely hope for more)! Enjoy the read and thanks, Eduardo, for submitting!
During an audit of security practices and controls at a major, internationally-recognized museum, an incident was related to us that the Chief Curator (who shall remain nameless to protect the institution) had invited a television news crew to do a “show and tell”.
The Curator wanted to show off to media and presented a superb forgery of a very well known work. The news crew asked how could you tell it was a forgery? and the Curator said OK I will show you and then proceeded to extract the original work from the vaults (this was a breach of security access and movement control protocols). He brought out the original, placed the original and the forgery on two identical easels, and proceeded to demonstrate how his superior knowledge of the subject allowed him to discern the real one from the forgery. The Curator then proceeded to show other pieces and provide interpretation, leaving the first two paintings unattended. One member of the news crew decided it was time for a prank and switched the two works without Curator being aware of it, as his attention was elsewhere. Curator returned and the news crew asked again, for their viewers, which one was the real one please? He identified the forgery as the authentic work.
Afterwards the Curator was told what had occurred and it was weeks before independent verification identified the real work and returned it to storage.
This paper machine was measured a few times before being transported.
If you want to hear museum people moan, just say “measuring”. Everybody has a story about it. Murphy of Murphy’s Law seems to linger around our tape measures, folding rules and distance meters. Not all stories are as extreme as the story shown in the pictures. The paper machine was measured again and again because it was obvious it was the most difficult thing to move in the great storage relocation. We had a technical documentation. We had specialists in heavy loads for this, experienced in much more problematic cases than our “little” paper machine. We had confidence in our abilities as professionals when we supervised this part of the machine being craned on the low-bed trailer. It was not until then we realized the machine didn’t fit through the gate when standing on the low-bed trailer. It wasn’t much, maybe a few inches. It seemed that the inaccurancies in measurements (height of the machine part, height of the trailer, height of the gate) just added up to the worst case. There was no denying – we had a problem.
On the flat-bed trailer the machine didn’t fit through our gate. The riggers had to be creative…
Fortunately, we had experienced heavy load riggers. After a few discussions we decided to crane the machine on wheel boards and push it carefully through the gate. It worked. After passing the gate the paper machine was craned back on the low-bed trailer and moved to its new home.
Don’t let your eyes fool you: Now it seems obvious that it doesn’t fit through the gate, but that’s only due to perspective. In reality it were only about 4 cm missing.
Other cases in wrong measurements are less spectacular, but the problems caused are sometimes bigger. I don’t know why, but some people tend to round down when it comes to measuring. Not particulary helpful, especially if you have a crate builder or a showcase designer who has the same tendency…
A special problem appears when you work with international partners. In the European Union, measuring in the metric system is common practice, whereas the UK and the USA use their own system (Imperial units and United States customary units, which vary in some cases). You normally keep this in mind as a registrar but misunderstandings are bound to happen anyway. I remember one case when a hardly readable fax with object data reached us. Looking back it sounds weird but for a long time we planned that something will arrive in a small box of approximately 50 x 20 x 21 centimetres (20 x 8 x 8 inches). When the estimated shipping costs were faxed we were shocked by the amount given. It was then that we re-read the fax, realizing that we misinterpreted it. Yeah, the sign behind the measures was NOT a double prime (“) it was just a normal prime (‘). The small sign that seperates the inch (1” = 2.54 cm) from the foot (1′ = 30.48 cm). We were not going to receive a neat little crate, we were going to receive a veritable 20’ container…
Angela
A project to break down language barriers and connect registrars worldwide
