Connecting to Collections Care

Hi all,

One of our summer interns is working on organizing our archival material into a more easily researchable state, with the eventual goal of making them available online. This was begun a few years ago by another summer intern using a system learned at the London National Gallery of Art, but that system does not seem well suited to such a comparatively small institution. The Smithsonian was our first thought for inspiration, but trying to adapt their system presents the same issues as the L-NGA. 

Currently the bulk of our archive is broken up into three areas. We have the typical alphabetized collection of artist and object files, a chronological collection of combined exhibition and program files, and a largely unorganized collection of files that had fallen by the wayside. We are looking to take information from these areas and organize them into specific collections that may be more useful to researchers. Any insight on how your organization handles their archiving would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Debbie 

Deborah Mallett Spanich 

Maier Museum of Art Registrar 

O: 434.947.8136 x2 

Randolph College 

2500 Rivermont Avenue, Lynchburg, VA 24503 

www.randolphcollege.edu 

Founded as Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1891 

 ~ I am out of the office on Tuesdays ~ 

Hi Deborah, 

Thanks for writing in to the C2C Care Community! That's a great question that I'll need check in about with our experts. In the meantime, you may find some useful resources on the ARCS site if you haven't checked there already:  ARCS Resource Kit. ARCS also has a few publications available via that Resource Kit that may be useful, although they may be too general for what you need. Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections (found on WorldCat here: WorldCat Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections) breaks down a lot of how to sort through and categorize what a museum may have. It's disadvantage is that it does start from nothing instead of from a history of collecting. If you're a member of ARCS, they have a similar community function where you may get additional responses. 

I'll keep you posted for any updates from the C2C Care experts!

All the best,

Liz

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Elizabeth Peirce
C2C Care Monitor 7/8-7/21
Conservator (Objects)
Library of Congress
Washington DC
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Hi All, 

Following up with a note from one of our experts:

"One thing that we do with our archival (and oral history) material is use a set of Local Terms. This is a series of terms we developed specifically for our collection. Since in some ways our focus is narrow (WWII) LOC and other cataloging schemes were not specific enough to help us really describe the content of our collection. We used LOC terms as a basis, but then narrowed down to be more topical for our use. Here is a sample:

I'm not sure if developing something like that would be helpful, but one idea to explore."

I've included the LOC classification system link that the expert mentioned as well: Library of Congress Classification Outline

All the best,

Liz