Tag Archives: documentation

A Beetle Is Not A Coffee Cup – Why Moving Natural History Collections Is Not Like Moving House

It might sound trivial at first that a beetle isn’t a household article but if you look closer, it isn’t. When a coffee cup breaks during a move you just go ahead and buy a new one. It gets annoying if it belonged to a set that went out of production a while ago. It becomes an irreplaceable loss if said coffee cup was connected to a special memory, for example because it belonged to your great-grandmother or because your child made it themselves.

Museum collections are pretty similar to the last case but now it isn’t just about the memory of one person or a family but about the history of humankind. Which means that the loss is far more grave.

Now, when it comes to collections of natural history an additional aspect comes into play: here, the loss of one object equals an irreplaceable loss of information that is important for current and future research. This is of course also true for art and history collections but in these cases at least the loss can be tempered if the object was well documented and digitized. Our beetle, on the other hand, is a repository in itself. Only this one specimen was collected at precisely that time and precisely that place and preserves all information about its environment at that time. No form of documentation and digitization can anticipate all the questions future generations of researchers will have. The preservation of that information is only possible by preserving the beetle itself.

Beetles in a museum collection. The insects are sitting on a acid free cardboard which is pinned with the accompanying label to the drawer or showcase.
Beetles in a museum collection, photo by Markéta Klimešová via Pixabay

Not all beetles belong in a collection

Because the preservation of the objects is so important generations of researchers tried to keep them out of harm’s way. Now, natural history collections are especially attractive to pests and therefore every biocide the chemical research and industry discovered in the last centuries was used in them. DDT with insect collections, arsenic with taxidermies, mercury in herbaria, from nerve toxins to organophosphates you are handling everything that can harm your health or even kill you.

In case of a collections move this means you have to deal with two aspects absent from a conventional household or office move:

  • You have to prevent pests from getting to your objects during transit. This means that the items you are moving need to be packed the way no pests can get inside and that you have airlocks and quarantine stations on your transport routes so you can be sure nothing got infested.
  • When planning the work to be done in preparation for the move you have to keep in mind that you are handling toxic goods. In the past the use of biocides was rarely documented and the only way to be sure what you are dealing with is gauging your collection before you actually start working. This will tell you which precautions you have to take previous to packing and moving and what you have to account for in the new storage.

On top of that there is another danger: the objects themselves. Some of them are toxic or radioactive and therefore you have to treat, transport, and store them differently than your common coffee cup.

Packaged beetles – No package tourists

Transports get quickly done if things can be standardized. You know that from moving house: if you can use standard packing crates they will fit seamlessly into the truck. All you have to do is pack them in a save and reasonable way and avoid overloading.

In natural history collections there are many things that can be standardized: Our beetle will most likely be stored with a lot of its fellows in one drawer and this drawer can be neatly packed and moved with other, similar drawers. But a lot of other specimen don’t do their collections managers the same favor.

Many are stored in glass containers filled with alcohol or formaldehyde which means they are not only fragile but also sensitive to vibrations and their contents inflammable and noxious. You are also not allowed to transport them through a water protection area, which you have to account for when planning the shipment routes.

This is but one example of the many special, non-standard cases you have to deal with when planning the move of a natural history collection. Some specimens are so heavy you need to hire specialized riggers to move them. Others are so fragile you need to get special crates built for them. Many are both heavy and fragile. Then others are preserved by freezing them and if you want to move them you have to make sure the cold chain stays uninterrupted. A taxidermized giraffe or the skeleton of a whale can keep a whole team of experts occupied for days just to find the best way to move it.

Storing beetles – Not a case for your local furniture store

If you have read this far you already guessed it: if you want to store a natural history collection then this storage space needs to fulfill a lot of criteria. It has to deter pests, have a stable room climate, needs a good air circulation and has to be equipped with furniture that allows objects to sit in them for centuries without being damaged yet be easily accessible for research.

Different kinds of specimen collections can have very different requirements. High humidity is a problem for most of them because it enables mold and attracts pests but a room being too dry can cause problems as well. Fluctuations in temperature can rupture the skins on taxidermy specimens and cause fossils to break. An insufficient air ventilation might cause a high concentration of toxics in a room and/or introduce mold. Good collections storage provides the appropriate climate for each of its collections. They are built the way that even in case of an emergency that results in failure of all technology a good storage climate can be re-established by conventional means in such a short time that no permanent damage or even loss of objects happens.

Accessibility is part of a safe collections storage. You need to be able to remove one specimen in a way the other objects stored with it stay unharmed. Our beetle in its drawer is a real space saver, here. Other specimens need far more space. For example, it has to be possible to remove a specimen stored in a jar of liquid from its shelf without having to move other containers. This means you can’t fill your shelves to maximum packing density and you need more storage space but for a good collections storage this is inevitable.

For all these problems there are good solutions but they are not available in your local furniture or hardware store. There are experts and manufacturers who have specialized on these topics.

Whatever is planned for your final storage has consequences for your move: If your beetle is right now in a drawer that is contaminated by pesticides or simply doesn’t fit into your new storage furniture this beetle and its comrades have to move to a new clean and fitting drawer before the move. It is rather common that one big collections move means a lot of smaller moves beforehand.

Ask the beetle anytime

When art or history collections move they often put parts of their activities in collections, exhibitions, and research on hold. A natural history collection that is part of an international network of research institutions in most cases can’t afford this comparative luxury.

In effect, this means that the move has to be planned and executed very different from other moves. It isn’t possible to pack whole collections and store them in a compact and largely non-accessible way until the big move takes place. It must be possible to get access to every collection and every specimen at any given time.

In general, there are two ways of dealing with that: You can limit the time an object is actually crated and in transit, which means that preparation, packing, moving, unpacking, and storing is a matter of just a few days. Or you can crate the specimen in a way that access is possible at any time and without endangering the object itself and the objects packed with it even during the move. Both possibilities have advantages and disadvantages but they both mean that you need more space both in the location you are moving from and in the one you are moving to. It means as well that you need more time and more staff compared to other types of collection moves.

To sum up: Why moving beetles needs a sum of money

With your own experience of moving houses in mind the amount of time, money, and staff it takes to move a museum collection seems to be comparably high. An impression that quickly vanishes when you know the reasons.

Make no mistake, no museum collection is as such “easier” or “harder” to move. Every type has its own, unique challenges. But natural history collections are for sure among the most complex ones you will encounter. And they have a disadvantage: while everybody intuitively understands that you can’t just throw the Mona Lisa on the back of an old truck, a beetle is at first sight “just” a beetle. It isn’t at all obvious that this beetle is a repository that holds perhaps more important and undiscovered information than the well researched and documented artwork by Leonardo da Vinci.

This adds an additional challenge to a move that is already made complex by the variety and sheer masses of objects that have to be brought safely from A to B: the general public has to understand that a beetle is not a coffee cup.

Perhaps this article can help a bit with that.

Angela Kipp

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Registrar Trek goes Washington D.C.

Fall is the season for conferences and this year I will be at Gallery System’s Collective Imagination in Washington D.C. from November 13 to 17. I am excited to meet a lot of registrars, collections managers, and other people involved in museum documentation there. Of course, I will speak about managing previously unmanaged collections, this time about how to tackle them if you are using TMS. If you attend as well, drop by and say “hi”. If you don’t attend but are in the area and like to meet for a coffee, drop me a line. I can’t promise it will work out, but I will be around on the weekends before and after the conference to get to know the city, so it might.

See you there!

Angela

View on the Capitol and the city of Washington by day from a heightened position.
The Capitol and the city of Washington, image by 12019 via pixabay.
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How do I catalogue a smartphone app?

By Paul Rowe

Some app symbolsTraditionally museum collections were made of physical items covering everything from beetles to books, and archives to artworks. Photography collections consisted of the analogue works – negatives or prints of the photographs. The items being added to museum collections are increasingly born-digital works such as photographs taken on a digital camera or films recorded on a smartphone.

We recently had a question on our users’ forum asking for advice on how to catalogue a smartphone app. How do born-digital works fit within the traditional museum cataloguing process? Where do you start with more complex acquisitions such as software package or app?

Here are some general tips about cataloguing born-digital objects, as well as some notes on multimedia material that you might only have in analogue form (such as reels of film).

Link the source digital files

When cataloguing any born-digital works you should link the digital files directly into the catalogue. These could include a high resolution original image and smaller images derivatives if they’re used by your system. For a smartphone app, you may be able to link to still images from the user interface or a trailer/help video about the app.

You may also be able to link to web addresses for the digital material, such as GitHub source code page or Wikipedia page describing a more complex digital item such as a smartphone app.

Many systems will be able to automatically import metadata from linked files so that you have detail including creation dates and capture equipment, dimensions and duration.

Use the standard object cataloguing fields

Many of the fields used to describe traditional collections will still apply to multimedia material, including born-digital files. Typical fields that you might use are:
Object Type: a simple description of the type of material. e.g. Sound Recording, Smartphone app.

Measurements: if you don’t have duration as metadata directly in the digital file then running time and digital file sizes could be noted in the catalogue record.
Size Category: analogue film stock is usually stored in standard can sizes. These could be created as standard size categories in your system.
Display Requirements: describe the equipment required to play the recording or to use the app.
Format: e.g. Digital Video Disc, 35mm colour film, iOS app
Sound: e.g. Dolby 5.1
Colour: Technicolor
Scale: e.g. 4:3 or 1200px x 900px.
Timecodes: You can note the start and end time within an audio or video file of key clips or episodes. Each start and end time should have title or description noting the subject of the clip.
Special Features: Note features available on a commercial film release or special attributes of a software package or app.
Technical Details: Note any important technical details such as DVD Zone or Video codec.

Carriers versus Titles

Large audio or video collections often include multiple copies of the same recording. Each copy is often referred to as a Carrier. An example would be film, which the organisation may hold as a 16mm master copy, and as an analogue VHS and digital DVD copy for lending.
For larger catalogues it can be worth splitting the catalogue detail into a title record and linking this to multiple related carrier records. The title record captures the intellectual description (the title, who made it, when and where was it made). The carrier records describe details of the copies (what format are they in, where are they stored, what loans and conservation work have they been involved in). This is a more complex structure and is only necessary when large numbers of duplicate copies are managed.

Vernon CMS

This article was as a result of a question specifically about using Vernon CMS to catalogue a smartphone app. Our tips should be applicable to many similar cataloguing systems. You can read more about the Vernon Collection Management System on www.vernonsystems.com.


Paul Rowe is CEO of Vernon Systems, an New Zealand-based collections management software company. Vernon Systems develops software to help organisations record, interpret and share their collections. Paul is particularly interested in the use of web-based systems within museums and increasing public access to museum collection information. He is occasionally seen caving.

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Mercury – A Tale of the Importance of Good Documentation

It’s a strange thing. The topic of hazardous materials in collections pops up every once in a while but as human beings we tend to forget about it because we consider that – of course – we know these hazards are there, but, then again, we are rather sure we know our own collection well and that if we act according to our safety precautions we are safe.
When mercury was found in the air in one of our storage areas during a pollutant analysis, I was shocked and surprised. Of course I knew we had mercury in our collection. We own a considerable number of thermometers and mercury switches. But until this day I considered our handling instructions and other precautions safe enough. This mercury was all contained, right? Yes, it was. But we never had thought of other sources, open sources that were hidden in our collection.

Discovering open sources of mercury & lessons learned

Automatic organ containing open mercury source (sorry for the poor quality of the pcture).

Automatic organ containing open mercury source (sorry for the poor quality of the pcture).

As we started to research our objects through the lens of “mercury” we discovered that, in fact, there were a couple of objects we never thought of. It turned out that there was an automatic organ which operated with contacts that dipped into mercury in some ceramic containers. In our medical history collection we had devices for counting thrombocytes in blood samples that operated with open mercury. However small, given that mercury evaporates at room temperature, even small outlets are an issue! There were barometers and even chronometers with open mercury sources. It was quite an effort to find out which sources we had. Even more to either remove or contain the mercury and seal and label the contaminated objects properly.
We learned quite a few lessons along the way:

  • Never assume you know everything about your collection
  • Never assume your policies and procedures cover every aspect
  • Never assume that you are safe, keep an eye on recent research

But maybe the most important lesson was about the importance of good documentation. And we learned it the hard way.

All expert knowledge at hand, but still…

Looking back, if someone had thoroughly researched the working principles of said objects, he or she would have discovered that they needed mercury to work. We don’t know if someone knew this when the objects were acquired. At least whoever did it, didn’t mention that they contained mercury in the documentation and the catalog entry.

Mercury switch inside of the automatic organ

Mercury switch inside of the automatic organ

It’s the disconnected working processes that are the real health hazard here! When we look at the classical museum setting there are different people with different knowledge involved in the documentation process. People whose skillsets are perfect matches but all their knowledge is useless if it isn’t interlinked in the workflow:
The curator might know best that mercury was necessary to make an object work, but might not be aware that mercury is a problem. The conservator has, due to his or her education, deep knowledge about dangerous substances but not about the object and might not see the object before it is stored if it is in good condition. Even if he or she checks its condition before it goes off to storage, the mercury might be hidden inside, so the conservator isn’t aware of the danger. The collections manager has some knowledge about dangerous substances but not about the object and might not be able to spot the danger if it isn’t widely known to his/her profession (like arsenic in taxidermied specimen is). The database manager has the knowledge about how to make dangerous substances retrievable in the database and maybe even know how to label them properly, but again, as he or she doesn’t have knowledge about the object, he or she doesn’t know there’s a problem.
Although all the experts work for the same institution, if they don’t assess the object together and bring their knowledge together, they are likely to overlook a danger and impose a health risk on colleagues, future researchers and visitors.

The importance of knowledge in cataloging

It is also obvious how dangerous it is when whoever is doing the catalog entry doesn’t have indeep knowledge about the objects. There is a tendency in museums to think that cataloging is a task that can be done by “whoever”. Knowledge isn’t important, every intern can key in a short description and some measurements, right? Of course we all know that’s nonsense, but arguing against it is tough. It’s hard to communicate what damage it does if dates, measurements and categorizations aren’t correct. With hazardous materials the danger should be obvious: someone doing the catalog entry who hasn’t enough knowledge to understand the working principles is likely to overlook the danger and therefore imposes a life threat to his or her colleagues and visitors.
If the curator can’t do the catalog entry him-/herself for a good reason (And: no, being too lazy/old/busy to learn how to do it isn’t a good reason, at least in my book!) he or she has to share his/her knowledge about the object with whoever does the catalog entry.

How to do it better

Objects containing mercury labeled according to international standards.

Objects containing mercury labeled according to international standards.

There are a few things that can be done to avoid unpleasant surprises:

  1. When an object is acquired, consult with everyone involved in the process. All the expert knowledge at one table will help to discover as many potential hazards as possible.
  2. If you are a one woman/man museum, make sure to reach out to experts in your area, your regional museum association or international experts via listservs and online groups to learn about the possible dangers your new acquisition contains.
  3. If the hazard is new, define safety precautions in handling and storage. If the hazard is long known, make sure your handling and storage precautions are still up to date with current research.
  4. In the database: make sure the hazardous material is named. In an ideal setting you do have a thesaurus of dangerous substances to pick from which are linked to safety precautions and correct labeling.
  5. In the database: make sure an object that contains dangerous substances is clearly distinguishable from other objects so everybody is aware that there might be special handling and storage precautions.
  6. In the storage: label dangerous substances according to international standards.
  7. In the storage: store hazardous materials according to the safety precautions. This might involve special containers or rooms with a ventilation system and handling instructions clearly visible on the container.

Live long and prosper!
Angela Kipp

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CIDOC 2016 – Documentation is About People

As I was sorting my notes from the CIDOC conference in Milano1 I discovered that, unlike my notes from other conferences, it was hard to separate the sessions from one another and to separate my personal conversations with colleagues from the presentations and discussions at the conference. So, I gave up on summarizing the different sessions I attended and took a look at the big picture. Was there a leading theme, something that played a part in all sessions and discussions? Well, yes, there was, and, a little bit to my surprise it wasn’t something like “we need to contextualize our data more” or “we need better standards” or “we need to do more marketing for our profession”. The leading theme – at least for me – was: “Good documentation starts with people doing it and is only good if it is useful for people.”

Colleagues enjoying the opening ceremony of ICOM 2016 Milano at Castello Sforzesco.

Colleagues enjoying the opening ceremony of ICOM 2016 Milano at Castello Sforzesco.

Take the presentation of Alexandre Matos about implementing standards in some museums in São Paulo: the translation of the SPECTRUM standard into Portuguese, the localization of it for the local needs and the implementation of some of the standards in three museums was made possible by people doing it – included, and maybe the most important of all, by people in the State Secretary who were convinced that having standards in museum documentation is a good and necessary thing. How many good projects towards professionalization in our sector are blocked because officials don’t deem them necessary?

It’s the same with other projects like developing a combined and enhanced textile thesaurus out of the diverse ones that already exist at the HTW in Berlin, or the “International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)” (http://iiif.io/) developed in Yale to support the work of researchers, or the experiences from automating processes in a museum library in Zambia. It all comes down to people who take the initiative to improve existing processes or to develop new ones – and not simply for the joy of doing it, but with their audiences and colleagues in mind.

Presentation ”Spreading the word: explaining what Museum Documentation is - and why it is important“ (photo via @CIDOCevents)

Presentation ”Spreading the word: explaining what Museum Documentation is – and why it is important“ (photo via @CIDOCevents)

As a collections manager among documentalists I halfway expected that I would feel strange. After all, while I use our database often, my job is more about taking an object out of the location it tells me than about thinking about thesauri and definitions. But I discovered that the topics discussed where highly relevant to my own work. Maybe it struck me most in the presentation “Mind the gaps: missing connections in museum documentation” given by Michael Jones. He described the issue that in research there are often missing links because you either search for something in the archives or in the object database or in the picture archive, but you don’t find the relations between the items found. So, while you might find the diary of an expedition in the archives, you might miss that there are specimen found during this expedition in the storage area and pictures of the crew in the picture archive. It struck me, because it’s one thing we do often in our own database in the TECHNOSEUM. Whenever I find a connection between two artifacts I will document this connection in our database. When we have archival material about an object or it is mentioned in a book it is often already referenced in the object catalog entry. If an object was shown in a special exhibition, you will find the label text in our database. I always took this high amount of interlinking done for granted, nothing I gave a second thought. It was only here, at the CIDOC conference, that I learned that this isn’t something that goes without saying. And again, the reason that it is available are people. People working in documentation at the TECHNOSEUM who chose a database software that was able to provide such linking between different categories of material and who created field sets and implemented processes that make it easy for everybody to make such connections.

A project that immediately grabbed my attention and fascinated me was the “Encyclopaedia of Museum Practice” (http://cidoc-dswg.org/ ) that was initialized by Jonathan Whitson-Cloud. It is a project aimed at developing a multilingual wiki on museum terminology so everybody working in the field all over the world can look up terms and understand what they mean. We had a fruitful discussion about the project and some hands-on tries on the software. I shared some of the experiences we had at Registrar Trek with working multilingual. Again, this project is highly dependent on people just taking a heart and start adding terms and providing translations, so here I want to encourage you, the reader, to create a user account and start filling the “Encyclopaedia” with content!

Marzia Loddo and I at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo da Vinci"

Marzia Loddo and I at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia “Leonardo da Vinci”

Maybe what I will remember most about the trip to Milan is the people I met and the conversations I had. And again, the topics of documentation played a role. When you are meeting with an art historian like Rupert Shepherd at the “Porta Nuova” in Milan you might learn that for a renaissance researcher this place is somewhere else than for the common tourist collections manager. Yes, terminology is important but we managed to find each other and fellow documentalist Susanne Nickel to enjoy a good Italian dinner together! Of course, there’s nothing better than swapping documentation horror stories with fellow documentalists and I did so with many colleagues I had never met so far or knew only via the internet – and with people I haven’t seen for quite a while. It’s funny that you might work next town for years but you need to go to Italy to see each other and have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine together. And I learned that nothing stops a Registrar Trekker! Marzia Loddo, one of our Italian translators, and I managed to meet each other although a couple of incidents including a broken washing machine tried to hinder us!

It was great fun, thank you Milan and maybe we meet each other while working on the “Encyclopaedia”?

Best wishes
Angela

This post is also available in Polish, translated by Marcin Mondzelewski, the translation originally appeared on the blog of the Polish Museum Registrar Association http://inwentaryzatorzy.blogspot.de/.

  1. You might like to take a look at the hashtag #CIDOC2016 on twitter to find what people found noteworthy while attending the conference.

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Registrar Trek goes Milano!

Dear Registrar Trekkers,

I’m all excited that I will present a short paper together with Rupert Shepherd from the National Gallery in London at the CIDOC Conference in Milano. It is called ”Spreading the word: Explaining what Museum Documentation is and why it’s important“. We are part of the ”Introduction to Documentation Standards“ session that is scheduled for the 4th of July, 4 to 6 p.m.

photo by hikersbay via pixabay

Duomo di Santa Maria Nascente (photo by hikersbay via pixabay)

At the moment we are finetuning our talk which will be about the importance of initiatives like the hashtag #MuseumDocumentation, this very blog and all other projects who aim to make documentation and collections management more visible for the public and decision makers.

As the CIDOC conference is part of the big ICOM conference it will also be a great opportunity to meet colleagues I haven’t seen in years as well as meeting people I know so far only from the internet. I’m especially excited that I will meet our Italian translator Marzia Loddo in person. 🙂

And of course, I will write a short report on how it’s been when I’m back. Don’t forget to follow the hashtag #CIDOC2016 if you want to know what is going on.

See you in Milano!
Angela

This post is also available in Italian translated by Silvia Telmon.
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Nomenclature 17.2 – A Registrar’s Vision

CC0 - by Master Tux via pixabayOkay, I have a vision flashing in front of my eyes as I go through the database cropping photographs and renaming artifacts. Like the toasting fork that had been catalogued as a Pan, Roasting. My vision is of the future of the ungainly, poorly bound green book that tells me what I am and am not allowed to call these objects. Some of these things are difficult for a child of the mid twentieth century to identify. So I am seeing a future digital version of Nomenclature, and if you are willing to fork out the extra bucks, you get a version like Leafsnap where you photograph the item on your portable device and show it to the Nomenclature 17.2 program and it says, aha! And you say eureka! Because the device tells you what to call the item. How cool is that?

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A registrar needs a flexible mind

The professional practice requires to keep up to date. You have to “think outside the box”, without constraining into one thought pattern or routine, especially when there are situations that require reflection and need to be addressed with a flexible mind. The registrar of the permanent collection of a museum should be especially flexible. Continue reading Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail