Museum Collecting Lessons

Acquisition Stories from the Inside

Steven Miller, Steven Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000576382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Museumswissenschaft

Museum Collecting Lessons explains how and why museums meet their fundamental duty to collect. It is the first book of its kind to explore the diverse ways these unique institutions acquire what is preserved and used for exhibitions, programs, publications, and online applications.

The 11 chapters that make up the volume are written by museum practitioners working in art, history, and science museums in the United States, Canada, and India. Together, the essays provide fascinating insights into a wide variety of significant acquisitions and museum collecting initiatives. The authors explain customary collecting methods, including donation, purchase, and field retrieval. Commonly shared acquisition denominators are also covered and include mission pertinence, quality control, the feasibility and legality of acquisition, personnel and volunteer involvement, and long-term retention assurances. The philosophies and realities presented within the case studies shine light on recent debates about who is included or excluded in museum collections – especially when it comes to race, ethnicity, gender, political perspectives, places of habitation, and economic status.

Museum Collecting Lessons reflects upon past and ongoing issues relating to museum acquisition practices. Offering valuable insights about philosophical, practical, and ethical collecting practices, the book will be of interest to aspiring, beginner, and experienced museum professionals around the world.

1 Making Sense of Your Community Museum Collection Strategies for Stuff Management

John Summers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216384-2

A Stroll Through Storage

It is day two of your new job as curator of a community museum. Yesterday was a whirl of activity: meeting the board, lunch with the chair, getting keys and an alarm code, finding your desk and the coffee pot, meeting the rest of the staff (it did not take long because there are only three of you!), and dropping in on the volunteers during their weekly coffee and donuts session at the diner down the street. Today, you are getting a tour of collections storage.

In the lobby, you meet the program coordinator, who is holding a large bundle of keys with a tag that reads “Curator’s Keys! Do Not Touch!” With a palpable sense of relief (because she has been acting curator as well as doing her own job for the past three months) she hands you the keys and says, “These are yours now, follow me.” You put the keys in your pocket and walk through the galleries to the first of the museum’s three collections storage areas. You unlock the door and she says, “Wait here” before walking through the darkened room to a light switch on the far side.

The lights come on to reveal a low-ceilinged room that is crossed by sprinkler pipes and made even lower by suspended fluorescent light fixtures. In front of you are several ranges of shelving holding more ceramic crocks and wooden carpenter’s tools than you have ever seen in one place before. To the left, the shelves hold wide flat boxes full of textiles. Beyond that, banker’s boxes are stacked six high along the wall. At the back of the room is a life-size fiberglass cow standing next to a tall-case clock.

To the right are more shelves. You can see rows of shoes, teapots and teacups, and children’s toys. There is a cardboard box labeled “buttons” and another on which someone has crossed out “children’s bedroom” and written “assorted silverware.” On the lowest shelf are several ship models. At the back of the room, next to the cow, is a jumble of bicycles, children’s wagons, tricycles, and an old gas pump. A large circular metal sign reading “Fire Chief” leans against the back wall. Tilting stacks of banker’s boxes line the wall on the other side too.

After a quick walk-through, you lock the door and follow her to the second storage area, located in the basement of the old town hall a few blocks down the street. You go down narrow stairs with a sharp turn to a basement room filled with the hum of the furnace. Next to a hot water heater is a door marked “museum.” Inside are more shelves packed from top to bottom and sagging slightly under the weight of innumerable glass insulators and dairy bottles. Next to these are a stack of thin wooden boxes which, upon closer examination, contain thousands of small pieces of lead type. To your right are tall narrow plywood shelves containing tightly packed pieces of art. You can just see the first one, which shows several dogs seated around a table playing cards.

Having seen enough, you lock up and go to the third and final storage area. It is a rented unit at the local self-storage, located a five-minute drive away on the highway leading out of town. With difficulty, you unlock and raise a dented garage door. Spiders and what might have been a mouse run for cover as soon as the door is raised. Inside, packed so tightly that you could walk across the room on them without touching the floor are carriages, wagons, sleighs and cutters, wardrobes, and other substantial pieces of wooden furniture. Along one side is a large millstone mounted in a concrete base and several pieces of what look like factory machinery. Along the other are portions of several carved sandstone columns from the old Masonic Hall. Some of the wagons contain upholstered sofas and other items of furniture. You don’t go in farther than the doorway because, as the program coordinator points out, it will take at least an hour to pull the first three carriages out into the parking lot just to get to the light switch.

Returning to the museum, you are shown the area where the collections volunteers have been working. The wall above the desk is filled with shelves of binders. To one side are several filing cabinets, and two antiquated computers sit on the desk. You are told that the cataloguing volunteers come in Tuesday and Thursday mornings and that they are gradually transferring the paper records into the computer. They have been working on this for the last five years and have made it as far as accessions from 1973. It is day two, and your museum collections journey has begun. All this stuff is now your stuff.

Everything I have described here is taken from experiences gained as a volunteer, staff member, or consultant working at museums in both the United States and Canada. Do any of these issues sound familiar to you? Do all of these issues sound familiar?

In its current condition, this is a collection that makes no sense. It is of little use to the museum, staff, or public. It is more of a liability than an asset, and at the present rate of documentation progress, it will continue to be so forever. With problems everywhere you look, it is hard to know where to start. As daunting as it seems, however, the alternative to doing something, which is to do nothing, is far worse, so you need a plan.

In this chapter I am going to walk you through four simple questions that can help you turn your collection from a liability into the asset that it should be. They are:

1. What do we have?
2. Why do we have it?
3. What should we do with it?
4. Where do we go from here?

By asking and answering these questions, you will come to understand the current state of your collection, think about how you got into this situation, make a plan for how to deal with it, and ensure it doesn’t happen again.

What Do We Have?

In more than three decades of work in this field, I have yet to see a museum that was either completely on top of, or even satisfied with, the state of its collections management documentation. In smaller institutions especially, there are often several generations of numbering schemes, and considerable time, and possibly also money, is being spent trying to reconcile them with each other. As new acquisitions are made and collections tasks are pushed aside by other priorities, the backlog of unprocessed items and unreconciled records continues to grow until it just becomes an accepted fact that you will never catch up.

From the early years of the museum, there might be one or more handwritten ledgers. This is the old-school way to keep track of artifacts. Each line in the ledger records the donation date, the name and possibly address of the donor, and what was donated. If you are lucky, it will say something like “three sad irons, two earthenware mixing bowls and one set of copper measuring cups.” If you are really lucky, the ledger will also be neatly written in the kind of penmanship most of us can only dream of today. If you are not so lucky, it will just say “miscellaneous household items.” Either way, this is often the only record of the collection that covers that period.

At some point, incoming donations likely got ahead of this ledger and began to accumulate. The museum might have gotten a grant to hire summer students to address the cataloguing backlog. Using hard-copy inventory forms, they set to work full of good intentions but by the end of the summer they had only made it partway through. More students were hired the following summer, but it was hard to tell where work on the first project had started and stopped, so they began with a different year and also did not complete their project by the end of the summer. Because everyone was focused on this project, no one updated the old ledger with that year’s accessions and so it got further out of date.

A previous curator developed their own numbering system using two-letter prefixes before the accession date to indicate what kind of artifact it was: VE for vehicle, FR for furniture, TO for tools, and so on. That curator has long since retired, but the numbers remain in use. The year that the museum acquired its first computer, one of the board members, who owned an accounting firm, developed a spreadsheet application for cataloguing, and staff and volunteers began to transfer written records onto the new system. As with earlier efforts, however, this was never completed for the entire collection. All those computerized records are stored on floppy disks and a magnetic tape drive, and there is no longer a computer in the building that can read them.

Here is the main problem: none of these efforts has ever made it all the way through the collection, and they each started from a different place. When you put all the information contained in them together, it still does not add up to the entire collection. The best thing to do at this point is not to launch another cataloguing project or hire more summer students. What your museum needs most is a simple, plain-vanilla collections inventory. Picture your collection as a layer cake. Previous documentation efforts have produced what you serve someone after dinner: a triangular piece. It contains a portion of all the layers in the cake from top to bottom but only affects part of the whole. The next person who wants a slice might cut an adjacent triangle, but they could just as easily cut a new piece on the other side. An inventory, by comparison, is one entire layer. The crucial difference between the two can be seen from above: even though it is not as tall as the triangular piece, the layer/inventory is a complete circle.

An inventory will give your museum what it has never yet accomplished: a complete record of the entire collection at a defined point in time. True, it will not be a very detailed record, but there will be lots of time to add detail later (by adding frosting, putting another layer on top of the first one, and so on). Humans need closure, and so do collections management projects. At the end of an inventory, you will know for certain what you have, because you will have touched, recorded, and photographed every artifact in the collection. To do an inventory, you will need some way of identifying all of the places where your collection is stored. This can be a row/bay/shelf listing, or an area of a room, or some other system. What matters is that someone with a diagram can find the particular location of an object. Next, you need a hard-copy listing of all of the artifacts in the collection – at least according to the collections database and any other records you might have. Finally, you need a way to take photographs as you go. These are record photos, not beauty shots, so a cellphone camera is just fine.

For each artifact, locate its accession number and write it on either a piece of paper or, better yet, a small dry-erase board. Place the written number in front of the artifact and photograph it against a neutral background or on the shelf if it cannot be moved. What matters is getting a reasonably clear photo of the item in which the accession number is visible. On a hard-copy sheet with sequential page numbers (1 of **, 2 of **, and so on, note the storage location, the accession number as it is written on the artifact, and the simplest possible description of the item. If the artifact doesn’t appear to have a number, give it a sequential number preceded by an X (X1, X2, X3, and so on) and photograph this with the artifact. This will identify it as an item that was found during the inventory.

Using your diagram of storage areas, keep track of where you have been. If you have more than one team working on the inventory, assign them each a separate location and record what they have done on a master diagram. Will this be tedious? Yes. Will it take some time? Yes, but less time than cataloguing. Once this has been completed for every area where artifacts are stored, reconcile the hard-copy inventory sheets with what the database says you have. Will this be tedious? Yes. Will it take some time? Yes, but less time than cataloguing. Be strong, persevere, reward the staff and volunteers who are doing the work, and see it through to the end.

At the conclusion of this inventory the records of your collection can be sorted into three piles. The good pile contains artifacts with collections records. The two problematic piles contain collections records without artifacts and inventoried artifacts without collections records. There will still be a lot of work to do after the inventory to determine if objects have been misnumbered, placed in the wrong location, overlooked in the inventory, or, for whatever reason, have just left the building, but for the first time you have the information that will make this possible: a comprehensive portrait of your entire collection at a single point in time. You have achieved closure and have taken a significant step towards achieving the twin goals of a well-managed collection: physical and intellectual control.

Why Do We Have It?

Now that you know what you have, you can start to think about why you have it. It is quite possible that by the end of the first week of your inventory project you will be experiencing doubts about whether or not you will ever finish and wondering, first silently and then aloud, why the museum acquired all of this stuff. You might even ask, as you look at a wooden box filled with rusty horseshoe nails or a box of crayons, each of which has its own accession number, “What were they thinking?” (remember, these are all real-life examples). You could respond by doing a Google search for “Soren Kierkegaard” or “Jean-Paul Sartre,” realizing that you are a museologist but also an existentialist, deciding that the world makes no sense and leaving it at that.

Or you could make some coffee; buy a box of donuts; gather the staff, volunteers, and board members together; and ask them, “So why do we collect anyways?” Even if you are of a perennially sunny disposition and unlikely to be driven to despair by the idea of photographing 30,000 objects in a month and looking at spreadsheets until your eyes hurt, you should still ask because this is one of the most important questions a community museum professional will ever face.

The period from the mid-eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century could be called “The Great Age of Acquisition.” During that time a museum’s primary purpose was to collect and diffuse knowledge, and therefore the more it collected, the more knowledge it would have to diffuse. This approach built some of the world’s great cultural institutions. For community museums, however, it also led to the situation described at the beginning of this chapter.

So Then Why Do We Collect?

1. Because we would not be a museum if we did not.
2. Because we need to have one or more of everything, right?
3. Because if we do not collect this object now, who will?
4. Because it might be used in an exhibit someday.
5. Because if we say “no,” the donor will be mad, or sad, or may not send us a Christmas card, or may never talk to us again.
6. Because if we do not collect this object, something bad might happen, even though we do not know what that might be, or when or even if that might happen.

I am fairly certain that you will hear one or more, or perhaps all, of these reasons when you ask your group the question. To help you prepare for this meeting, here are some talking points:

1. Your museum’s mission statement or statement of purpose outlines several reasons why it was founded, and collecting is probably only one of them. Even if you stopped collecting tomorrow, you would not be short of stuff to work with (that is what got you to where you are now, remember?).
2. You are running a cultural institution, not a humane society. Nor are you loading an ark. The renaissance is over, and we all understand that the encyclopedic collection is a myth.
3. Perhaps no one will collect as they might have in the past, and that is not necessarily a problem. Remember, you are running a museum, not a thrift store.
4. You know you can borrow objects from other museums, right?
5. That is a possibility, but there are ways to say “no” that will benefit both you and the donor. See later.
6. Be brave and it will be ok.

For community museums, the liberating, life-changing answer to the question “why do we collect?” is “to tell stories that ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Making Sense of Your Community Museum Collection: Strategies for Stuff Management
• 2 Collecting Our Culture: Eeyou Cree Collecting at Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute
• 3 Strategies for Acquiring Contemporary Art: Creativity and Collaboration
• 4 Collecting Period Rooms: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francis W. Little House
• 5 A New Museum Builds a Collection: How One Gift Leads to Others: James A. Michener Museum of Art’s Acquisition Success
• 6 A Museum-Defining Acquisition: The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata, Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ
• 7 Unpacking the Baggage: The Smooth Acquisition and Transfer of the Lee L. Forman Collection of Bags
• 8 How We Got Our F-16 Fighting Falcon
• 9 Community Collecting Conversations: Acquisition Stories, District Museum, Jorhat, India
• 10 Collecting Nonverbal History Documents
• 11 Barnum Brown’s Bones
• 12 Conclusion
• Index