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 feels like writing something about the event? Or reporting on a single session that inspired him or her? Or a session that made him/her mad? These reports are all very welcome. Please leave a comment if you are willing to volunteer.

Thank you all very much!
Angela

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 technology enthusiast, was excited.

Even more when I learned that Fabian, my fellow Museum Studies graduate and colleague from the days we developed the clay brick exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in Munich was involved. Of course I had to support the campaign, so here he introduces the project:

Dear Collegues,

we start on May 2nd, one of the largest support campaign for a museum project in Europe at Kickstarter.

It is one of the most important pioneer aircraft, the Junkers J1 that should be reconstructed in a 1:1 scale model. The J1 was the world’s first all-metal aircraft and it had its first flight 100 years ago. It was such an important masterpiece of aviation, that it was exhibited in the Deutsches Museum Munich. However, the plane was unfortunately completely destroyed by a World War II bombing raid.

Our campaign will to support the detailed reconstruction by the technical museum “Hugo Junkers” in Dessau. Please help us to make our campaign a success by posting the J1 Project page (www.facebook.com/j1project). Join in at our Kickstarter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/j1-project/junkers-j1-recreating-the-worlds-first-all-metal-a). For every amount donated, we have come up with something very special: a limited Junkers J1 wristwatch, a J1 model plane, a postcard set with 24 facsimile designs, aviator glasses and more.

Only when many supporters participate in the crowdfunding campaign, we can finance this ambitious project and rebuild the Junkers J1 on the basis of the original plans.

Many Greetings from Munich

Fabian Knerr

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 (or, in fact, from all our storages and offices). Didn’t have an idea that this would be sent out via our RSS feed just like any other blog post.

Well, anyway, to keep you in the loop: what is happening at the moment?

Over Christmas I was experimenting with arduino and other microcontroller boards. Of course, even if I try to do something just for fun, I end up doing something museum related. As I needed something to build, I built a data logger. And if it’s already built, why not take it to work with me?

At the moment one little prototype of the “Little Registrar” keeps a good watch over our climate in one of our offsite storages and sends its data to a website. And since this week this other little fellow records the climate in a storage room at our museum and logs it to a SD-Card:

As you see by the q-tip that serves as the restart button this is all in the prototyping stage at the moment. In fact, the “Q-tip Registrar” was a quick answer to an urgency call by our conservators. Assembled with parts I still had at hand, including an old cardboard box, a screw anchor, some ethafoam and, yeah, a q-tip.

Those who follow @RegistrarTrek on twitter know that I promised to write what we did and how and I will do, as soon as we passed the prototyping stage (and stopped creating e-mail bombs).

Have a great weekend, all!
Angela

This post is also available in Russian translated by Helena Tomashevskaya.

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 there was much to do with managing taking over a large collection of broadcasting equipment and finding space for it in an already crowded storage area. At night and on the weekends I was busy writing about managing unmanaged collections. One of my cats was hit by a car and badly injured but fortunately is recovering and nearly back to normal. Of course, the departure of Derek as an author was a big loss, too. Well, this is a weak try to apologize for not being as active as in previous years in finding new contributors and topics for this project. I hope in 2016 I will have more time again to keep watching our profession and dig out more stories.

Anyway, we had some great stories: the most read post with the most active contributors was “How NOT to number objects“. We had many readers asking to have a follow-up on current best practice in object marking. If someone feels like writing something about that, even if it is just for one group of objects, this would be a great new series, helping people who are unsure, especially after this post! Nearly as popular was the post “Put a lid on it” by Anne T. Lane and the real-world examination of the damage light does on post-it notes by Judith Haemmerle. We saw some great new books being published, the forth edition of Basic Condition Reporting, Nomenclature 4.0 and The Rights and Reproductions Handbook were presented here. We also started a new series, “Failures in Figures“.

The topic of unmanaged collections was strong this year and even when the book is published I want to keep it as a focus, because I think those stories from the trenches really help those struggling with their own collections. The European Registrars Conference is in Vienna this year (Yay to our colleagues from the Austrian Registrars Committee!) And I hope I will be able to attend and write a report. There are still some promised reports from ARCS in New Orleans, hopefully coming soon!

As more and more of our readers coming here with mobile devices I hope I will find the time to adapt our layout to be more mobile friendly or find alternative solutions for this issue.

So much for a lookout on 2016, keep following us and keep wearing those gloves!

Cheers,
Angela

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 happy, healthy and successful New Year 2016!

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 the same challenge.

Now, what’s the trouble? Registrar Trek is a project that is alive because of its various contributors, the authors as well as the translators and the readers who read, comment, like, share and tweet about it. So, seriously, who is entitled to say: “challenge accepted” in this case?

As @RegistrarTrek was nominated and I, Angela Kipp, am taking care of the English twitter account at the moment, it seems legit that I take the challenge. But that’s just where the trouble starts. My own educator days, when I explained how the Enigma worked or how coffee is made are long over. I work in the background, far away from the challenges my educating colleagues at the front-house face every day. And the ones I would first turn to when I need an educational advice are actively interacting with visitors, school children, adults, students, toddlers, questioners and vandals. I may find them doing a #tweetup but most of them and most of the time they are out there inspiring people face-to-face, not on twitter. So, I will broaden the scope of this challenge and nominate people who do great stuff and who can be found – among loads of other places – on Twitter:

My nominees

First of all I nominate @ceciliapeartree. She’s an active collections and documentation professional who keeps pace of new developments and doesn’t shy away from pondering new technologies in collections management. Besides she writes mystery novels. A lot of them. And she even brought a little drone to her session at @ERC2014. I would love to nominate her “Coolest Collections Professional Ever” (CCPE), but as this price doesn’t exist, she’s my first in the #TwitteratiChallenge.

Then, @MarkBSchlemmer who invented #ITweetMuseums a hashtag used mainly by museum professionals who visit other museums and share what they see. A whole new way of experiencing museum visits (you may also follow @ITweetMuseums).

Linda Norris @lindanorris does amazing projects around the world, writes books, has a great blog called (Brace yourself, fellow registrars and documentalists!) “The Uncataloged Museum” and a joint blog with German and Russian colleagues called “Museum, Politics and Power” which was designed for the ICOM conference 2014 but has many interesting thoughts.

My next nominees are two museum professionals who are active and inspiring tweeters: Alli Rico @alli_rico, a young emerging museum professional whom I had some inspiring collections based discussions with and who has her own blog called Alli’s Adventures in Museums and Suzy Morgan (@Kw33n5uzicus) who is a conservator, editor of the Multilingual Bookbinding and Conservation Dictionary and always fun to tweet with.

What to do?

• Within 7 days of being nominated by somebody else, you need to identify colleagues that you rely on or go to for support and challenge. It might be a good idea to check that they are happy to be challenged so that the #TwitterChallenge chain doesn’t break down.
• Record a video announcing your acceptance of the challenge, followed by a pouring of your (chosen) drink over a glass of ice. Then, the drink is to be lifted with a ‘cheers’ before nominating your five educators to participate in the challenge. (This is optional for the technically challenged).
• Write your own #TwitteratiChallenge blogpost within 7 days nominating your chosen participants who then become part of #TwitteratiChallenge. If you do not have your own blog, try @Staffrm.
• The educator that is now newly nominated has 7 days to compose their own #TwitteratiChallenge blogpost and identify who their top 5 go to educators are.
• It’s optional to make a donation to your chosen charity but if you do you may want to identify one or two charities that may be of interest to others. For example, Debra Kidd’s highlighted the World Wide Education Project as a great charity to support or Nepal needs all the help it can get after the devastating earthquake.

The rules

There are only three rules:

1. You cannot knowingly include someone you work with in real life.
2. You cannot list somebody that has already been named if you are already made aware of them being listed on #TwitteratiChallenge. I realise this will get more complex over time.
3. You will need to copy and paste the title of this blogpost, the rules and what to do information into your own blog post.

Wait, what about that video thing?

Okay, here you go:

1. print out this picture
2. cut along the white lines to get separate glass, beer and bottle opener
3. open cut-out bottle with cut-out opener
4. take cut-out glass
5. pour imaginary beer
6. say “cheers”
7. say “I nominate @ceciliapeartree, @MarkBSchlemmer, @lindanorris, @alli_rico and @Kw33n5uzicus.”
8. imagine me doing it on video

In the spirit of Nigel Lashbrook: inspiring people to challenge existing rules should be an integral part of education. Kudos to the educators who do!

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 allow someone to use it? And do crystal balls work if you wear white gloves or nitril gloves? Questions upon questions…

What we can promise is that in 2015 we will keep you entertained with articles and stories from the field. Sadly, Derek retired, so, unfortunately, his next article will be also his last one. But it’s a blast, so stay tuned for the story of Lennon’s Rolls Royce!

During the holidays my hubby and I dived into the world of microcontrollers and yes, there might be some registrar’s prototyping ahead. Or an accidentally destroyed arduino. Or both. Let us just experiment a little bit more…

2015 will see the second ARCS conference, this time in New Orleans so I’m sure we will have a report. We will continue to support good museum documentation and we hope that many of you use the hashtag #MuseumDocumentation on Twitter. And I know that wherever you work and wherever you are there are wonderful, untold registrar’s stories we all want to hear, so send them via story@museumsprojekte.de.

Thanks for reading, stay with us and keep us posted!

Angela