Dear Readers of this Registrar Trek Blog,

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

Today, I want to share with you a new project I’m working on and I ask you to join.

In my working life I’ve stumbled upon one conundrum of our profession time and again: there are really great books and online resources about best practice in collections management – the wonderful 5th Edition of Museum Registration Methods readily comes to mind, but of course there are much more. You read what is best for the artifacts, how to treat them, document them, store them… These books are written from the perspective of ”best practices“ and as we all strive to reach the best for our collections, that’s a good thing. Only that the starting position is often all but ”best practice“. Take Antony Aristovoulou ‘s story ”Match-ball for the Registrar“ as a prime example: being contracted for relocating and registering a collection of tennis artifacts and discover that all is stored in one giant shipping container and you have to start from scratch, including sourcing locations and material.

All too often, especially for small and middle sized museums with historical, agricultural and/or science and technology collections there is a gap between what is written in books and the real world. Reading about best practices is great and necessary, but standing in an old shed with a leaking roof and heaps of rusty things that were euphemistically called an agricultural collection in your contract you are miles away from taking your acid-free cardboard and start building a custom box for a single artifact.

To make a long story short: I’m about to write a practical guide to manage previously unmanaged collections. This book will be written with the worst case scenario in mind, starting with nothing than a collection in peril and working step-by-step towards improving the situation ¹. It will be written for the practitioner in the field who has to deal with all possible and impossible circumstances while trying to get her/his collection managed. Especially it will be written for people who are thrown into this situation without having it done before – may it be job starters or colleagues who have only worked in larger and/or well organized institutions so far.

This is where you, the readers, come in. This book will be much better and encouraging with real world examples. Sure, everyone loves to be the best practice example but what I’ll need here are examples of how difficulties were tackled and how issues were resolved. How collections that were in peril were brought to a better stage. Maybe still far away from being ”best practice“ but still much better than before. I’m collecting all kinds of worst case examples, brought in from veteran museum professionals young and old who have encountered unbelievable situations in collections management (I’ve seen a main sewage pipe right above the shelves of an archive, so, the possibilities are endless…).

Every now and then I will present you some aspects I’m writing about here on this blog and will ask for your experiences and thoughts. It would be great if you would be willing to share them. I promise that I won’t abuse your willingness to share and will always check if the way I want to use some of those examples in the book is acceptable for the original author and her/his institution.

Thanks for reading and best wishes

Angela

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