Orphaned Objects

Bit busy lately writing a major funding bid for my day job so there's not been much progress with the digitising of my family negatives. However, the mountain of job specs, tender briefs, budget spreadsheets and myriad other supporting documents I've been accumulating for this application has made me consider how much paperwork even a small museum can generate. I'm thinking particularly of ...museum policies. Policies, policies, policies. Museums have policies for everything - a policy for what you collect, a policy for looking after the stuff you collect, a policy for cataloguing the stuff you collect, a policy for training people to look after the stuff you collect, a policy for disposing of things you no longer collect, a policy for engaging visitors with what you collect, a policy for making sure what you collect doesn't get stolen or go on fire or get wet, a policy for planning what you're going to do with the stuff you collect over the next five years, a polic...

In December 2015 I gave a presentation at a 'Heritage Show + Tell'  event in Leeds. The event rules were simple - three slides, three minutes, tell a story about your project. I've lost count of how many seminars/lectures/talks/expositions/etc/and-so-on I've sat through at heritage sector events, but this was one of the first formal events I'd spoken at and had to, like, dress smartly and that.  Some of those drawings are mine. Drawing is not among my skillz. I was working for Scarborough Museums Trust heading an Arts Council audience development project, part of which involved commissioning a pop-up 'Museum of Scarborough' which would tour the community and be an enthralling interactive celebration of all things Scarborial.   This was an ideal project to roll-out for the Show + Tell evening, but my quandary was how to make my 3 minute presentation lively, enthralling and in keeping with the quirky nature of the pop-up project - an issue exacerbated by my ...

 I love cataloguing. There, I said it. Which is for the best really as if you’re going to work with museum collections and you don’t love cataloguing, well, you’re probably not going to have a good time.  Archiving cataloguing is a time-intensive and, yes, at times tedious job. Before I hit the scanner for my family photo digitising project I need to decide how to catalogue the images - after all scanning thousands of photos isn't much use without an easy means of navigating them. I’m creating a catalogue from scratch which is tremendously exciting but can also lead into bad habits which will waste time and compromise the final product if not set up right. It’s critical at this early stage to establish a system that will record an appropriate amount of information in a logical and useable way, so it’s worth sitting back and considering the options. Daunting. This is a daunting spreadsheet, alive with potential, the bleak white wilderness piercing my soul. Or similar. In pr...