Into the Archive: Part 2
“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it”
In the UK, documentation standards for museum collections are shaped by the Spectrum Procedure, a comprehensive set of policies which define in simple terms how best to categorise, organise and digitise a museum collection.
These policies involve documenting an object’s location in a museum, whether it is on display in storage and keeping track of when and if it moves and if so to where. This would mean that a museum could avoid objects going missing without anyone noticing, and then being found years later being sold on ebay. Now that would be embarrassing.
In fact, most objects stolen from museums aren’t daring heist-style thefts, where burglars in catsuits dangle from a ceiling over a large diamond, but objects taken covertly by staff from a storage case which never sees the light of day and hasn’t been thoroughly and properly documented. No one knows they're gone, because officially the object was never there.
Another facet to this is that online documents are kept to satisfactory levels so that online users can peruse the collection and find relevant, helpful information for whatever their purpose. Increasing public accessibility to collections. For many museums, who only display a fraction of their collection, this is a major benefit. Unfortunately it is a mammoth task and for many the object backlog is literally a lifetime's worth of documentation. Fun fact - As I read through these procedures I am purposefully ignoring all the warnings about how big of a job creating and maintaining an archive is, for my own sanity.
Maintain your collections to a satisfactory level however and you might be eligible for a Museum Accreditation, a benchmark indicator that your museum is well-run and accessible for visitors and users. A good job sticker, if you will.
I covet this sticker.
I wonder if they would give it to a fake museum if it was organised to within an inch of its life to Spectrum standards?
Let’s find out! Haha no. Or yes?
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Sadly this means I must familiarise myself with the Spectrum primary procedures, which tragically means reading at least the core nine, which are:
Object entry
Acquisition and accessioning
Location and movement control
Inventory
Cataloguing
Object exit
Loans in (borrowing objects)
Loans out (lending objects)
Documentation planning
It is these standards that I will be using to help build a framework for the Wunderkammer’s archive procedures. There are 12 more procedures also, but I’m but one woman, so let’s take it easy at first. The aim is to produce an MVP, a minimum viable product - not the other kind - that provides the most basic collections service while still being a usable website.
On to the policies themselves. Now I could read all these like a novel, but I’m already reading a novel (Daisy Jones and the Six, it’s fine) and anyway I believe in learning on the job. Also my museum is not physically there in the traditional sense. So in the absence of a physical space, I’m working backwards from the policy.
One major issue is that I am conducting a two-pronged attack, essentially creating two services.
Collections documentation record
Digital collections
So this is both a documentation and digitisation project, subtly different, I would probably consider them to be Front of House and Back of house versions of the same system.
Before I can really, truly dig in however, I need to consider what I have to work with. A website, guidebook and two un-thriving social media channels of Instagram and Twitter (my fault!). I will be doing this in tandem with the Inventory procedure.
So join me next time, when we’ll map the museum.
Best,
L x