Challenges

Challenges

We have estimated that approximately 72,500 items, or one third, are currently catalogued out of an estimated 250,000.

Catalogued and uncatalogued items are often housed in the same storage box (solander) or drawer, leading to delays in retrievals. It is also difficult to grasp an overview of the collection as a whole, or to know how to prioritise items for cataloguing, digitisation, and collections care activities. As a result, it is not always possible to be sure an item has been catalogued based on location alone.

Object descriptions, object numbers and locations are often inaccurate and require investigation and correction.

Relationships between artworks from different locations are often difficult to identify and challenging to maintain. No part numbering procedure was ever applied prior to the inventory. We are introducing part-numbering for multiple impressions, duplicates and series and would like to investigate whether it would be possible to implement the procedure during the cataloguing phase.

All items on catalogue, which we are also auditing, are documented on a non-Spectrum compliant library system (Sierra). One of the main issues is that the system shows a lack of features and poor structure when it comes to best practice for location control. Grid views and lists are also difficult to work with as they are not sortable by iconographic numbers. Additionally, we can’t run advanced searches in the same way we could with a Collections Management System.

We export metadata from Sierra on to Quickbase, and we process the items using this separate database as the majority of the artworks are not expected to be on catalogue. We only export some of the fields from the bibliographic record on Sierra, mainly focusing on the ones required by museum accreditation standards, such as Spectrum. Therefore, we sometimes come across complex scenarios which require us to work both on Quickbase and Sierra, making our job significantly time consuming with the risk of duplicating work.

For some of the collections that were re-organised, re-numbered or re-housed as part of past projects, we don’t have any information or written documentation. The only way to understand past decisions is to talk to William Schupbach, making our job strongly dependant from the knowledge of just one person.

Time and resources are also barriers.

TIME: We are expected to process both uncatalogued and catalogued material, by March 2021. As of end of February 2020, we have so far processed 33,000 items of which 15,550 are not on catalogue for the Visual material collections.

This has now changed, due to the closure of our buildings caused by Covid-19 pandemic. The new deadline for the completion of the VM inventory is April 2022.

RESOURCES: The Inventory team is composed of 4 people. Two people responsible for either one of the collections and two Collections Assistants alternating between the two specialties.

We have had a vacant Collections Assistant post since 26/04/2021 - 09/08/2021

CMS in use: Visual and Rare printed material are currently catalogued in a library system, which doesn’t allow us to easily perform many collections management tasks and more importantly it is not compliant with Spectrum standards.