Recently I took part in an interesting discussion on Linkedin that followed an article by Paul Orselli called „How Can Museums Shift, If The “Old Guard” Doesn’t Budge?“

It was a heated debate and suddenly it occurred to me that at least some of the disagreements sprung from different interpretations of the term „Old Guard“.

In regards to museums it can mean:

• Decision-makers at the top of museums that have held this position for years.
• Museum professionals who have been doing their job for many years.
• People who hold tight to norms, procedures and practices that were established a long time ago.
• People who are skeptical towards trying new things and believe it’s best to do things the way it’s always been done.

I bet your first reaction if you read that four points is: oh, yeah, I know those guys! And I guess this was exactly what Paul had in mind when he gave the title to his article. On a second look this isn’t half the homogenous description it seems to be. And this is where the issues start:

There are „old“ museums professionals who continuously try new things. There are decision-makers who would like to change their museum completely, from roof to cellar and don’t let anything be like it was before. There are young museum professionals who are skeptical towards new things and want to preserve their museum the way it is. There are museum professionals of all ages that believe that some norms, procedures and practices are in place for a good reason and should remain untouched – and are open at the same time for new ways in visitor engagement and outreach projects.

Against this background it is easy to see that a discussion about the „Old Guard“ is likely to go off track. As someone who cares for collections and is very critical towards everything that might put an artifact at risk, I would almost immediately categorize myself as member of the „Old Guard“. On the other hand I believe that „We’ve always done it that way!“ is one of the most dangerous sentences in every language. We should always try new things, if we don’t try, we can’t improve. So, someone who thinks of the „Old Guard“ as an aggregation of all the four points mentioned above will put me in a drawer I don’t belong.

How does all this relate to registrar’s work? I think it’s a good example why we who deal with museum documentation are putting such a great emphasize on using the right terminology and categories. It’s also the reason why we try to use standardized terms and avoid slang and metaphors. If we who live in the same era and work in the same field understand each other wrong because we use a term that can be interpreted in different ways, imagine what that means for future generations with a totally different background.

So, next time you overhear a conversation between your curator and your database manager whether it’s a „Jeep“ or a „vehicle, off-road“, keep smiling but bear in mind that this might be a conversation that will be indeed relevant for the future.

Angela

As a side note on the article:

It’s always startling that discussions concerning „new ways in museums“ nearly inevitably are pushed towards technology discussions. Surprisingly enough by both the believers that technology will solve every problem as well as the believers that technology is the downfall of humanity. In my opinion this leads to nothing more than driving participants to take sides with no middle ground to lead fruitful discussions.

If you ask me, we should always place the question „What do we want to achieve?“ first, before we look for tools to achieve it. And we shouldn’t allow anything to narrow our view – neither a gadget that we “have to” implement in our museum no matter what nor the assumption that all technology is distracting attention from the artifacts.

I often hear that people envy collections people for their interesting jobs. Being surrounded by art every day, being allowed to touch the originals, isn’t it wonderful? Granted, it is. But there are downsides, too. And I’m not talking about low payment, too much work and too few jobs or taking on responsibilities no one can really take (Preserving stuff in a way it’s still accessible in over 100 years? Find someone who accepts this bet!). I talk about what happens in your brain when you go to an art exhibition.

How bad can it be? Well, I made a snapshot of my mind when I visited the Midsummer Party at the Kiasma at the European Registrars Conference in Helsinki. They had their 13th collection exhibition and I was standing before „Laajentuja“ („Expander“) by Kimmo Schroderus from 2004.

„Oh, look at this, it’s gorgeous! Do you see the telescopic expanders? This thing will fit in literally every room. You understand? Every room. You can set it up in a castle, an aisle, a large exhibition hall, no matter what. And this should be easy to ship, too. I guess for the center sphere you will need a special crate, but the expanders should fit into a standard one. Well, only if they are really telescopic. Maybe they just look telescopic. If they are separate pieces, do you think they are hollow, so they fit into each other? Well, no, I guess this is too risky, think of the attrition. We will need several crates in this case. Or could we use pallets? What do you think, would they be good on pallets?“

And then my right brain snapped:

„Oh, shut up, left brain, I’m trying to enjoy the art!“

That’s it. That’s why you can’t really enjoy exhibitions if you are a collection manager.

Angela

BTW: Several weeks later I discovered a „making of“ from Kiasma that solved a few of the questions I had:

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

Transit artifacts can glimmer like icons (the token, a lit station globe) or provoke a sense of mystery and whimsy with their antiquated purpose (a Bend-o? a scleroscope?). Join our archives and collections staff as we bring objects and photographs from the Museum’s collection to life through writing, storytelling, and imaginative interpretation.

A sampling of artifacts and images are available online now – join us Wednesday, November 12th at 6:30pm to see these and many more in a pop-up exhibit designed to inspire your writing.

Create an exhibit label, poem, or short story; try your hand at the nuanced craft of lexicography; or show off your expertise by schooling us all in the true provenance of an object.

Fill the evening with a mixture of truth and fiction; we’re on the hunt for both the crafty and the credible!

Submit your pieces in advance or join us for a writing session and open mic on November 12th.
TELL A TALE OF A TRANSIT TOTEM
Wednesday, November 12th | 6:30pm | Free
New York Transit Museum
Downtown Brooklyn

View our first set of artifacts and RSVP here:
nytransitmuseum.tumblr.com/ transitTotem

Brett Dion

Beaujour, mes amis,

À bientôt
Angela

“I can order you a tarte flambée and a café au lait but might accidentally provoke an international conflict when trying to order a hotel room, why do you ask?” I said, looking up from a long list of objects that had to be cross-checked with our data base.

“This earphone is made in Paris, but I’m not sure about the manufacturer. Have a look.”
I moved over and took a look at his monitor where he showed me the tiny inscriptions he magnified by using an USB microscope*.

Marine Martineau, registrar and translator for English/French at Registrar Trek received the mail a few minutes later. She took a look and passed it along to Thierry Lalande, collections manager at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. He and his colleague Marie Sophie Corcy had the idea to ask Frédéric Nibart, a wide-known expert of the French phone.

Within a few days we knew that the earphone was built in July 1928 by the Société Industrielle des Téléphones in Paris. We even received an article from M. Nibart about their company history which we immediately included in our data base.

It was a great feeling of international collaboration made possible by the worldwide network of Registrar Trekkers. We really hope we can return the favor one day.

Angela

* = The USB microscope was originally part of a hands-on demonstration in a temporary exhibition and has a second and very useful live now in artifact research.

By Bernd Kießling

20 item(s)

You can watch the exhibition in 3D, too, if you have 3D glasses (red-cyan) at hand.

…you discover the reason why one hook in your tool box is missing: because it’s still in the exhibition. Sitting happily between the artifacts. Behind acrylic glass screwed tightly.

I hope you all enjoyed thinking about the situation I presented in the first part and have now decided what you would do.

What was the real outcome?

First of all, you will remember that I said in the first part that real life doesn’t work like an exercise. So, I didn’t have all the pieces of information as well-organized as they were when I presented them to you. I had to draw them together in the continuing process of trouble-shooting – with limited time and with a snowstorm approaching.

As you may have guessed, although option a) (pull out the trucks) was possible in theory, I dumped it pretty soon. It was the most likely to damage the trucks, either in the process of moving or because of weather/climate issues. Imagine moving historical trucks in great haste at the beginning of a snow storm! What are the odds that everybody stays calm and does the right thing? How likely is it that someone loses his head, letting go where he shouldn’t or not watching his step? Preventing artifacts from danger is only one aspect. Avoiding accidents, especially the ones that could lead to injuries, is another and more important to me.

I leaned toward option c) (wait until Monday) at first. Then I checked the webpage of the Deutsche Wetterdienst (DWD, German meteorological service), the precipitation radar and the weather dates of the nearby airport (which is our reference for local weather because it’s only 4 kilometers away).


At the moment we had about 55% relative humidity outside at about -3C. The weather forecast for Monday predicted the temperature would rise to 2-5C with a rain probability of 85%. The precipitation radar told me that the snow front was coming, but was likely to arrive some hours later than the warning time of 10 a.m.

So, I figured out I would have a small time slot for option b) (open gate, place cherry-picker on the outside, work on the inside), because Monday there would be exactly the same problem but with weather conditions worse than today’s. The longer-term weather forecast didn’t give me much hope that conditions would improve within the next week. In fact the -3 °C/55% RH setting seemed to be the best in the foreseeable future.

To double-check my intuition, I took out my faithful Molier hx-diagram. It told me that with this setting I would not reach the dew point in the hall (remember: 11°C/42% RH). The air would first mix, resulting in an increase of temperature and a decrease of relative humidity before the temperature would start descending. And with all artifacts being well heated at 11C, the risk of condensation seemed low (as opposed to what happened some years ago when some smart guy decided to open the gates to let the “beautiful, warm spring air” (18 °C/80%) into the hall (11°C/50%)).

If the snow front arrived early, we would still be able to interrupt the work and have the gate closed in about 10 minutes. So, I decided to take option b), but, honestly, I didn’t feel comfortable with this solution and would have been thankful for anyone providing an option d).


We were lucky. The detector was changed within one hour and the snow front reached us as late as 2 p.m. We re-heated the hall very carefully (which wasn’t problematic because the heating system is very weak) and all went well.

Why do I have all the data? Did this happen recently?

Some of you may have wondered why I have all the exact data present although I ran into this situation a long time ago. Cross my heart, I didn’t have to make it up! I just had to look it up.

In general, if there are problematic situations you can talk with experts in your museum or in the field to find the best possible solutions. You can make the decision yourself after you have double-checked with colleagues to see if you haven’t missed something important. Or you can present it to upper management and let them make the decisions. Whatever approach you take, you can say you did what you did to the best of your knowledge. Then, there are situations like this one where you are left to your own devices. You have to decide on the basis of the limited data you have, your experience and your gut feeling.

In these cases it’s important to do a double-check afterwards. Sure, if something goes wrong you know that your decision was wrong and you will do it better the next time. But if all goes well you will never be completely sure if it went well because your decision was right or just because you had an enormous amount of luck. This leads, in the worst case, to do the same thing again next time but with far less luck.

So after the incident, I wrote to many colleagues asking them the question I asked you: “What would you have decided?” It was very interesting to read their responses. In general, they approved of how I acted. Some asked if it hadn’t been possible to take the risk of having only one fire detector active, because since it is infrared it would surely react if there were a fire, even if it was in the other part of the hall. There were a few reasons I didn’t take that risk:

1. The two infrared detectors were installed at exactly the same time. If the malfunction had been a production issue, perhaps the second detector wasn’t fully reliable either.
2. In case of a fire I was not sure how the insurance would have taken the fact that one of the fire detectors wasn’t activated.
3. My main concern was this: What if a small fire were burning for some time in the area of the broken fire detector without the other detector taking notice? The fire could gain strength and when the other one finally did take action, we would have lost precious time for the firefighters to react. The hall was made of stone, so statics were not the main concern. But imagine the amount of oily, probably toxic smoke that would be produced by burning oily wood, trucks and trains, the contaminated air and how it would affect every artifact in the hall. And, at least among colleagues of technology museums, the pictures of what remained of the Nürnberg Transport Museum roundhouse are still present: http://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Nuremberg_Transport_Museum#Damage_following_the_fire_of_17_October_2005

Some colleagues had additional ideas, such as forming a voluntary fire watch among the staff for the weekend, to see if the weather really would be that bad on Monday, an idea I will definitely keep in mind for other cases to come.

When I was about to write this story down, all I had to do was to dig into my email archive of the year the incident took place under the keyword “trilemma” and there I could re-read all the data and some additional facts I have since forgotten, along with all the suggestions I’d received from fellow registrars and collection managers.

Conclusion

Looking back, there was much to learn from this incident:

• When planning storage, consider how safety appliances can be maintained without putting artifacts at risk.
• Keep all records of past incidents; you never know when you’ll need them.
• Murphy’s Law is still in force.

I hope you enjoyed this little real-life collections manager crime scene, and if you ever feel like sharing one of your stories, we would be glad to publish it on Registrar Trek.

Best wishes
,

Angela

Brought from rough into correct English by Molly S. Hope. Thanks Molly, I would be lost without you!

When you are studying museum studies or taking a course in artifact handling and preventive conservation, you learn a lot about ideal storage conditions, improving climate conditions, what to do, what to avoid. However, all exercises you solve in class are clear-cut cases. Normally, there will be one right answer to the question, “What would you decide?”

Then, there is real museum life. And like real life in general it doesn’t consist of clear cases. You will always run into situations where you have to decide not which solution to a problem is the best but which one is the least bad. Best practice is great but sometimes all you can do is decide between the disaster and the catastrophe.

This is a true story which I will tell in two parts. In the first part I will confront you with a situation, provide you with some additional information and leave you with the question, “How would you decide?” so you can think about the situation until I tell you how the story turned out.

The setting

You are the collections manager of a museum with a large collection of technological artifacts. It’s 7:30 on a Friday morning in December when you receive a call from the maintenance department: A fire detector has caused one false alarm in the night, with two fire brigades marching out. The detector was reset and caused another false alarm early this morning. It needs fixing.

The storage hall is provided with two similar infrared fire detectors, each one controlling one half of the hall. In order to fix it, the fire detector must be checked and eventually replaced by an external service technician and can only be reached using a cherry picker. The place where the cherry picker could stand inside the hall to reach the fire detector is blocked by two large historical trucks.
Alternatively, when one gate is opened, the cherry picker can stand outside the hall reaching inside and the technician can work from there. As a result, the temperature inside the hall would drop from 11C to around zero next to the gate, and a little more in places further down the hall.

Storage hall climate conditions

• Artifacts stored in the hall are trucks and railway material
• The temperature in the hall is 11 degrees Celsius
• relative humidity is at about 42%

Weather conditions

The local weather station currently reports a reading of -3C at 55% relative humidity, and the weather is overcast but dry. There is a weather warning by the meteorological service for heavy snowfalls, approximate starting time: 10 o’clock a.m.
The weather forecast for next week: on Monday, the temperature will rise to 5C with an 85% chance of rain. The weather will stay warm and wet for the next one or two weeks.

Telephone messages

FFS – Fine Fire Services, call 7:56 a.m.
A service technician can be there at 9 a.m. Work on the fire detector will take approximately 1 to 2 hours, depending on whether the detector needs only to be cleaned or completely replaced. The workers would have be notified by 10 a.m., otherwise they would not be able to come until Monday morning.

Conservator Trucks&Cars, call 7:59 a.m.
Trucks can be moved, but need heavy equipment and support from maintenance department.

Head of maintenance department, call 8:05 a.m.
Tow bar and truck able to pull the historic trucks are available; staff to help the conservator is available.

Conservator Trucks&Cars, call 8:07 a.m.
Where to pull the trucks? The only possible place is the forecourt outside the hall. How long will it take to pull them there? If work begins immediately, they can finish by approximately 9:30 a.m.

NOW IT’S UP TO YOU

Do you have all the information you need to make a decision? How would you go about deciding?

a) Pull the two trucks out of the hall so the technician can work inside?

b) Open one gate so the cherry picker can stand outside and the work can be done inside the hall?

c) Wait until Monday or later, leaving 50% of your hall without a fire warning system, until the temperature rises and it will be dry?

Now, my dear readers: How and what would you decide?

Read the real outcome here.

Sometimes we receive feedback regarding our articles on Registrar Trek from the farest regions of our planet. But last Monday it was feedback from just next door:
“Guess what I saw this weekend?” Dr. Hajo Neumann one of our curators asked me.
I was clueless.
“Hotel Art!” he grinned and showed me this picture:

Yes, folks, someone actually nailed the picture directly to the wall! So close the whole frame bends. That it was hung so close to the window that it gets all the UV exposure it can possibly get is a nice extra.