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.

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 people: Fernando and me. We had been exchanging thoughts for … well, almost exactly a year. We laughed, had fun, inspired each other and out of this, Registrar Trek was born. A small project at first. Two people writing articles and translating them in their mother tongue. When we went live in January, we soon gained more authors, translators and more languages. Registrar Trek grew rapidly, up to 37 contributors.

Rapid growth is great, but it’s difficult to keep an eye on everything. So, while I was busy managing new team members, adding translations and writing stuff, I didn’t notice that one team member was not happy with how things were going. A very important team member, my Captain (we often joked that his role model was Captain Jean-Luc Picard and mine was Admiral Kathryn Janeway).

The problem with working with team members from all over the world via internet is that you don’t meet people face to face. In the normal museum business your eyes or your intuition tell you that something isn’t understood the way it is said or that one team member is not happy. When this occurs, you could grab two cups of coffee, close the office door and sit down and talk. On the internet you have to rely on what you read from others, a very limited view of what is going on in another human being.

Maybe it was words I wrote that weren’t understood the way I meant them, maybe it was other things I did or said (or didn’t do or didn’t say), but the fact is that Fernando has decided to leave the Registrar Trek. No chance to reach him, no chance to set things straight, no chance to hold him back. I always said that if one of us stopped having fun, this would be the end of Registrar Trek. And in a way I still feel I don’t want to steer that ship without my captain, co-founder and co-administrator. So my first impulse was to close the project down.

But then, there are all of the great colleagues who offered their help with translations and the many people I know are working on contributions for Registrar Trek. And of course there are you, the readers of the blog, who keep us motivated to invest our free time in articles and translations. So, I feel a responsibility to carry on. I can’t promise that we can do it as well as we did before. Now, the captain is missing! But we will carry on.

Angela

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 team of seven grew to twenty! They came from nearly all cardinal directions and a broad range of professions:

There are the museum studies and museology students Patrícia Melo from Portugal and Carolina Vaz from Brazil.

Then I’m glad we have a professional translator on board: Salvador Martínez lives in Spain and translates Spanish/French and Spanish/English for a living, but agreed to lend us a hand for free!

Then the great colleagues who work in the jobs this blog is all about: Maria O’Malley, the Collections Manager/Registrar at the Southstreet Seaport Museum in New York, Lucía Villarreal, the Exhibitions Registrar at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and Cleopatra, the Registrar of a photography collection in a Folklore Research Institute in Greece and Sylviane Vaucheret, the Documentation Officer for Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland.

Then two colleagues from the profession that is closest to our own in respect of philosophy, viewpoints and aims: Molly Hope is a textile conservator from New York who already translated for the Ixchel Museum of Textiles in Guatemala and Rosana Calderón, is a Senior Conservator at the National History Museum of the National Anthropology and History Institute in Mexico.

And I’m especially glad an proud of the four colleagues that looked over the fence of their own professions and are willing to help us, because museum work is always a combined effort, no matter if you work in collections, education, exhibition and/or marketing:

Jiska Verbouw works as a science communicator at the Museum for Natural Sciences in Brussels. Arina Miteva is working for Smart Museum, a company that develops museum mobile apps. Tegan Kehoe works as a museum educator at the Old South Meeting House in Boston. Phineas Chauke is the Regional Marketing Officer at National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe.

With this great new team we will explore new languages, adding Dutch, French, Russian, Zulu, Shona and Shangaan. And we will travel onwards to new galaxies… oops, wrong film… to new stories, articles and other helpful contents for the registrars, collection managers and curators of collections around the world.

We will also explore a new medium: you can follow us on twitter (http://twitter.com/RegistrarTrek). Here we will announce any new post or article on this blog and more things that we find interesting.

Stay tuned!

Angela

This post is also available in French, translated by Sylviane Vaucheret

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 of the arts, art history, history, museums studies and many, many people who are just interested in what goes on behind the scenes in a museum.

As numbers show, we have been visited by nearly 10,000 people until now, who have read nearly 18,000 pages. This is great! But no reason to lean back, but to lean in. As we said in our starting post in January it’s our aim to give people the possibility to read registrar’s stuff in their own language. To achieve this, we need

YOU

If you are speaking two languages and are willing to translate something, please, drop us a line at story@museumsprojekte.de or write a comment.
We are not expecting anyone to translate ALL our articles and posts. We are looking for people who have read some of our stuff and say “Hey, this should be available in my mother tongue” and then translate this story or article. Every language is welcome, but especially welcome are people who are able to translate in the five languages we already have: English, Spanish, German, Portuguese or Greek.
We are enthusiasts, so we can’t offer you any money for that. But we can offer you our appreciation and the possibility to work in a wonderful multi-national team of museum enthusiasts.

Talk soon!
Angela and Fernando

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.

Angela and Fernando