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

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), tackled barcoding, spoke up for children in museums, found bombs and chased birds and bats in our collections. We’ve seen Matt coming to the cinemas with „Art and Craft“ and supported Rupert Shepherd’s initiative of bringing #MuseumDocumentation into public focus. To sum up: we told many stories worth telling.

But when we raise our glass today, I don’t want to say „Here’s to us, the collections people!“ Recently, there was a funny bit about registrars on Peabody’s Lament (http://peabodyslament.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/registrar-humor/) and in the comment section the author T.H. Grey stated „…we’ve often heard registrars refer to themselves as the “unsung heroes” of museums.“ Well, this may be, but we aren’t the real unsung heroes. When I think of unsung heroes in museum business, immediately the housekeeping and cleaning staff comes to mind.

If they are ever referred to in the museum world, it’s with a funny note, often when they clean something that wasn’t meant to be cleaned, like the installation “When it Starts Dripping From the Ceiling” by Martin Kippenberger in 2011: http://www.dw.de/cleaning-lady-destroys-contemporary-sculpture-with-her-scrubbing/a-15510231 The prejudice that only cleaning ladies are so dumb and uneducated that they can’t tell art from trash is so strong that most people think they are responsible for the destruction of the work „Untitled (Bathtub)“ (created by Joseph Beuys in 1960 and accidentally scrubbed clean in 1973) , while it was in fact scrubbed by two members of a German political party who wanted to clean the dishes from a celebration in it (http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/skandal-um-beuys-badewanne-a-947414.html). Strange that reports on artworks destroyed by other museum staffers or visitors (http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1956922_1956921_1956906,00.html) never come with the same malicious joy…

There is never a report on how cleaning staff saves millions of dollars in conservation and restoration costs every year because they avoid damage from dust, keep museums free from pests and report incidents and issues as soon as they see them. And they do see them, if we just tell them what to look for. It’s certainly no fun cleaning toilets and offices, especially those offices stuffed with paper where it’s really hard to find free spaces to clean (somehow immediately registrar’s and curator’s offices come to mind…). But keeping them clean is one foundation of our work: keeping dust, mold, pests and all the other bad guys out, so our collections are safe for the future. But in all those „keep up the good work“ speeches at the end of a successful year, thanking the board, the friends of the museum, the volunteers, the staffers in the collections, education, exhibitions, marketing and administrative departments, I’ve heard seldom a word about the cleaning staff.

So, at least on Registrar Trek, we are raising our glasses to you, our faithful housekeeping staff, partners in collections care and pest management!

And from the whole Registrar Trek Team to our faithful readers and supporters:

We wish you Merry Christmas and a happy healthy and successful New Year 2015!

Angela

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 days) and that I’m preparing the site to be fully functional in French, too, which means some additional effort. Oh, yeah, and there is my little side job as the collection manager of the TECHNOSEUM, along with garden, man and cats. But especially, I’m busy preparing my presentation and trip to Helsinki.

I’m all excited to speak at the European Registrars Conference about Registrar Trek (see full programme here: http://www.confedent.fi/erc-2014/programme2/) and hope my colleagues will like it. As far as I can see, I’m the only registrar from a Science and Technology Museum attending, so I somehow feel like a representative for an entire museum field and hope I don’t mess this up. I’m looking forward to meet many colleagues there who I only know via email, twitter or linkedin so far and I’m especially glad that Registrar Trek contributors Tracey Berg-Fulton and Derek Swallow will be there.

I guess there will be much to write about when I’m coming back and I hope to inspire some colleagues to contribute their stories and articles with my presentation.

See you after ERC 2014!
Angela

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 Registrar Trekkers and guest authors there.

Well, I won’t tell you what I will say in the presentation. No need to spoil the fun. But I can show you what my session proposal looked like:

 
A voice for Registrars and Collection Specialists around the world
The project „Registrar Trek: The Next Generation“

The focus of this session is to introduce the project „Registrar Trek: The Next Generation“.

For professional exchange and development the registrar or collection manager depends
on colleagues outside her/his own institution, often outside her/his own country. It takes
years to built a personal professional network. Job-starters, multitasking professionals in
small institutions and colleagues in countries where the professions in collection
management are still in the state of development are often left to their own devices. The
major obstacles are language barriers and finding colleagues for thought exchange.

Out of this observation the project Registrar Trek was born. Core of the project are texts
written by collection professionals or people closely related to this field. The spectrum
ranges from serious thoughts on difficult registration issues to lighthearted observations
out of everyday collections work. Starting as a small platform for articles about registration
and collections management in January 2013 in three languages (English, Spanish,
German) it grew to a source of information and exchange with 32 translators from 19
countries providing 16 different languages.

In the outcome, it serves two major purposes: to create a virtual place where collection
specialists from all over the world can feel at home and understood and as an embassy
for collections work in the virtual world. To say it in the words of one of our readers:

„I learn something from each of the articles, even if it’s just that things could be worse.“

See you in Helsinki!
Angela

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 – 11th of September 2014 in Dresden, Germany.
Anyone interested from museums and cultural organizations is cordially invited to participate. More details about the conference: http://www.cidoc2014.de/index.php/en .
Discussions and papers will focus on the access to museum collections and cultural heritage in the digital age. Linked data information provide scientists with new and wider perspectives. Experts from museums around the world will address the following themes

• Strategies and Policies in Documentation
• Processes in Museum Documentation
• Museum Documentation as Profession
• Networking
• Metadata
• Multilingual Terminology
• Digital Long Term Preservation
• Intangible Cultural Heritage
• GIS-Applications in Cultural Heritage
• Digital Documentation in Archaeology

Yours sincerely,

Martina Krug
c/o Staedt. Museum Hann. Muenden
museum@hann.muenden.de
CIDOC Board Member

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 in what we have in stock for the next year of Registrar Trek than in statistics*.

First of all, be insured that we will keep you entertained with stories and articles from the world of collections management. And we are happy for every new contribution you will send in. Our plan is to hunt for more practical hands-on stories, examples of good practice in registering, good storage solutions and smart ideas in documentation and collections management. We will even have some real world stories that will end with questions like “How would you decide?” leaving you with the possibility to chew on the problem until we reveal the outcome in one of the next posts.

Matt will keep us informed about art forger Mark Landis and his aliases, Anne has some more to tell “off the shelf” and Derek will take you all into the fascination of registrar’s work. Angela is planning to launch a small fun series called “The Museum of Spam”.

And of course, there will be stories and articles from guest authors. We’ve actually got one in the pipeline from a data base enthusiast and there are several others promised.

So, stay with us and stay tuned!

 
Your Registrar Trek Team

 

* Statistics: We published 62 posts, had 12,000 visitors who visited our blog nearly 20,000 times. Over 300 subscribed to our RSS-feed.

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

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 colleagues.

This year is different. Christmas „catches“ me in the middle of the installation of our upcoming special exhibition, on electrical household appliances. Last year was packed with taking care of vacuum cleaners, pressing irons, food processors, hair-dryers, coffee makers… well over 1500 objects were picked for exhibition, many more were researched and their data corrected in the data base. Now everything must be put in the right place, get individual treatment (i.e. fixing of loose parts or cleaning) and a correct label. No contemplative working process that invites reflectiveness. But I don’t want to leave for the holidays without my own personal review and outlook, especially because this time I can share it with colleagues all around the world:

Aside from the challenges of the aforementioned collections exhibition the last year was defined by the start and growth of Registrar Trek. We went live on January 2nd and I’m sure that there will be time for a special review on our first anniversary. It’s great to see how a weird idea from two people has developed within one year into a project that is known and supported by so many colleagues around the globe.

The financial crisis in North America and Europe is clearly noticeable, especially in the cultural sector. I know that many of our readers and some members of the Registrar Trek team are trying desperately to get back into a job in the field of collections management. Unfortunately, all that we can do is keep our fingers crossed and wish them the best of luck, courage and the power of endurance.

Those who are in permanent contracts feel the growing pressure of taking over more responsibilities because the work must be done with fewer colleagues and declining budgets. Combining professional ethics and financial needs is a difficult task. Amidst of all this trouble, let us not forget that the collections field is not the only one affected by the crisis. I have seen many discussions on professional groups and listservs about how money is spent on the wrong things and wrong projects, and it seems to me that every colleague envies the other for funded projects. Personally, I feel that’s not a successful approach. As registrars, collection managers, curators of collections or documentation officers we are in the same boat as conservators, educators, guides, guards, curators, marketing people… The boat is called „museum,“ and we will need each others’ skills to avoid shipwreck.

So, for the new year, let us do what we collections people do best: take care of the things that need close attention to detail, help with paperwork and organizational tasks, and, in the figurative sense, wrap the frayed nerves – our own and those of our colleagues.

I’m really glad that the Registrar Trek Team does consist of so many professions: there are of course registrars and collection managers, but also conservators, curators, marketing specialists, visitor guides and people from totally different fields. This variety keeps the exchange of thoughts interesting and the development of this project joyful. For the upcoming year, we have more exciting stories and articles in the pipeline, so stay tuned.

Now I’m going to gather some waste and stack a few pallets before I leave for Christmas. But before that, in the name of the whole Registrar Trek Team:

We wish you Merry Christmas and a happy healthy and successful New Year 2014!

Angela

This text is also available in Italian translated by Silvia Telmon.