School's out!

"Intellectual control" is a huge concept in museums. It's not to be confused with intellectual property which also happens to be very important. Intellectual control means that a museum can account for its objects, their history, their ownership, and so on and so forth. It's knowing where objects came from and where they are and if they should stay where they are. (By the way, if there are museum professionals out there with a better definition of intellectual control, please share.)

When I came to this museum, I was happy to find that a good level of intellectual control had been established over most of the collection - most objects have numbers which relate them to donors, and the database allows most objects to be easily located.



But nothing's perfect. There are several boxes of rocks, like the one above, mostly geologic specimens and fossil leaf impressions, which have escaped cataloging for the most part. Over the past week or so, I've been working in one of the store rooms beginning to sort out these specimens. I've set up a mobile command center at which I can sit and listen to my local NPR news station while I catalog, measure, and photograph these objects.



I'll be honest; these rocks are a challenge. Many of them have duplicate numbers. That is, they have the same catalog number as a different sort of object entirely. Some of them were labeled with a number on a sticker and the sticker has fallen off. It's my task to figure out how to identify these objects in our records. Before I make that decision, I am determining the extent of the duplicate issue. The two primary options that I see at this time are to 1) add a letter after the catalog number (duplicate 8-57 might become 8-57G (G for geology?)), or 2) assign new numbers which would come after the last catalog number for the accession. Both seem plausible. Option 2 seems reasonable given that most of the labels are not applied directly - they're on stickers which are falling off already.

No matter what I ultimately decide to do (and I am open to opinions and alternatives), I am going to document the heck out of it. Part of intellectual control is knowing the history of the object to the greatest extent possible. So if 8-57 is reassigned the number 8-514, for example, I would record that on both the paper catalog card which exists, and in our PastPerfect database. This way future collections managers will be able to avoid potential confusion.

On the flip side of the duplicate number issue is the missing objects issue. Going through these boxes have revealed many objects which were earlier unrecorded in the database and had been presumed missing. So for these objects, it's a happy ending straight away!

Still More Rocking, Still Less Rolling

Can you guess what these are?



Boxes on a cart? Yep! Boxes filled with.... rocks! Specifically projectile points and chipped stone tools.



All those boxes on that cart, yes all of them, are chipped stone pieces from a donation the museum received in the 1950s. The catalog cards read something like "Cigar box of arrowpoints, 200 in box. Found at campsites along the Columbia River." And there are many cards like that. At some point the "arrowpoints" were removed from the boxes they were donated in and put in these white cardboard boxes; I would guess it happened in the mid to late 1970s. And they've been sitting in them since then.

From time to time, people have worked with this collection of chipped stone, recording information about each object, placing it in a bag, and writing a unique object number on the bag. But the objects still remained in these boxes.



I find it difficult to locate things in the boxes, even the ones which have been previously worked over and individually bagged. In light of this, I have asked one of my intrepid volunteers to help me organize these lithics so that they are accessible. And also so we are able to evaluate if the 200 in the cigar box still number 200, or if some have been misplaced over the years. This project will also allow us to bag the loose objects for consistency. Additionally, the individual bags will protect the points from the kind of damage possible in the older storage (ie, a bunch of them in a box). A further benefit is that this project makes the objects more accessible to any researchers interested in working with this unprovenienced collection of lithics.



In the end, this arrangement will be more accessible, better organized, more easily assessed, and will save space.

Rock and roll! Actually, less rolling please.

Look at how shiny all those rocks are! But wait! They're impostors! Those are reproductions! Made from plastic! In the 1970s!



But no need to be all exclamatory. These are the kind of casts commonly used in education collections in museums and archaeology departments across the country. These are very high quality casts, but it is not the way of small museums to have such large Clovis points, or to have authentic Mousterian or Levallois pieces.

You'll note these casts have numbers on them. At some point in the past, these casts were accessioned into the permanent collection. By accessioning these pieces, the museum agreed to hold and preserve these pieces to the best of its ability in perpetuity. Whether or not a set of casts should or should not be held as "museum objects" is not a question we're going to address just yet. But the numbers were applied to show that the object belongs the museum and to give some information about it and to make it unique from the other objects that might look like it. The 21 means that these casts were our 21st accession. The 15 on that one in front means it is the fifteenth object cataloged.

You'll also note that the pieces are just knocking around at the bottom of that box there. Having objects "knocking around" does not mesh with preserving an object in perpetuity. So one of my projects today was to put the casts and their original sleeves in new polypropelyne bags, labeled and organized by catalog number (that's the accession number followed by the object number, or 21-15 for that one in front).

After completing my project, the casts are better protected, more organized, and accounted for.

This is actually a pretty good example of what a collections manager does: Protect, organize, and account for. It just doesn't sound as fun when you say it like that, does it?