 Everyone, Mike having trouble with his audio so I'm going to give this initial steal. I'm Susan Barger from Connecting to Collections. Mike Morno is from Learning Times and this is part of the Management 101 webinar series and this is the last one. If you hear an echo or if you have trouble with your audio, please put a message in the questions comment box and Mike will attend to that. Often people sign in twice and then they get an echo and they complain but just sign all the way out and then I think that's it. I'll be catching questions so just put them in the questions answer box and there's a download here in the lower left hand corner. Feel free to do that and I want to welcome you to Connecting to Collections care. If you are looking for information fast go to our website. We have lots of resources for people in small museums and for a smaller cultural institutions in general so we want you to get answers that are appropriate for you and there are over 120 webinars that are available in the archives so check those out and there's the discussion forum where you can ask questions and get answers and solve problems. That is one thing you need to register to do but it's still free. You can like us on Facebook you can follow us on Twitter. If you want to join the listserv which only has announcements maybe two or three times a month and it's only for announcements not for discussions just go to this cool.conservation-us.org address and you can sign up and you can contact me anytime this is my email address and coming up the end of this month we're going to have a webinar on caring for archives and then the beginning of November just in time for holidays we're going to be having a webinar on food in museums so that will include food at events food in collections and it should be really interesting. So today we're going to talk about inventories and Maureen McCormick is going to be our speaker. She's worked in museums and fine arts for a long time she's the longest venture care student and she was the chief register and manager of collections at Princeton for more than 20 years and very importantly for today she wrote the inventories chapter for what is colloquially called MRM5 or museum registration methods fifth edition and she now is the director of registration services at Altillier art storage in Philadelphia so I'm going to turn this over to her and just remember if you have any trouble put it in the in the question box and there we go. Okay it's showtime well thank you all for coming I have to admit it's a little strange to be sitting in a room by myself speaking to over 300 people but actually I'd be probably petrified if you were all sitting here in front of me. So as Susan mentioned I am the author of the chapter on inventory in MRM5 and I have to admit it struck me as ironic in the extreme that I was invited to write that chapter because at the time Princeton had never undertaken a full inventory of its collection. However Rebecca Buck knew that we were in the process of planning a major inventory project and that was why she invited me. That project would we estimated it to take three to four years I think it took closer to five years due to circumstances beyond the team's control it involved hiring five temporary full time staff members and then occasional other temporary staff members and it cost well I'm not I can't tell you that but a lot. Now I realize that Princeton's encyclopedic collection of close to a hundred thousand objects is not an average collection and that Princeton's significant financial resources are also far from average so I'm not going to talk too much about the particulars of our project but instead I'm going to focus on the overarching principles that we adopted and which in the end proved to be successful. Now my talk is geared toward those of you who are or who function as registrars or collection managers but I'm curious so I have a poll here I'd like to see who all is out there look at that this is so interesting okay I had there's a few directors here so I'm going to have to watch what I say. By and large it does look as though most of you are registrars or collection managers. Whatever your title if you have signed up for this webinar I'm assuming that you understand at least intuitively why in the midst of everything else that you're supposed to be doing in between coordinating exhibitions, outgoing loans, insurance policy renewals, shipping arrangements, processing new acquisitions, endless meetings and your daily game of email whack-a-mole you still must somehow find the time to create or maintain an inventory of your institution's collection but maybe you need a reminder or a pep talk or maybe you need to educate your colleagues especially your boss, your board, your umbrella institution if you have one, your community at large about why the creation and maintenance of a reliable accurate and up-to-date inventory is fundamental to your mission as a museum or collecting institution and why a collection inventory is worth the often sizable investment of museum resources human and otherwise in what is an admittedly Sisyphean task. I'm also assuming that you're taking this webinar because your institution does not presently have a reliable accurate up-to-date inventory so here's my next question. What percentage of objects would you say have a reliable or pretty reliable location record and I know where it is doesn't really count. Let's see wow really spread all over the place here but it looks like most of you are right in the middle of the pack you have some inventory records but they're not complete so that's interesting for me but I'm going to go back now to this very fundamental question of why inventory why should we bother doing this why is it important and if your job title includes registrar or collection manager the short answer is it's what you do. The longer answer means looking at the bigger picture so let's start at the very beginning with what a museum is. Here is what ICOM says. A non-profit permanent institution open to the public acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage of humanity for the purpose of education study and enjoyment. So right off the bat we see that there is an internal contradiction in what the museum business is all about. On the one hand we're meant to give access to our collections, on the other hand we are meant to safeguard them for future generations. Now most museums are in a small museum most staff job descriptions fall mainly into one or more of the categories of access or preservation. In the access category we've got curators, docents, visitor services, exhibitions, and special events. In the preservation category we've got security, conservation, building services, and as for registrar and collection managers well we get to do both but seriously we need to remember and we need to help others remember that an accurate inventory is the foundation of just about everything else we do as a collecting institution not something that we can relegate to the category of for a rainy day. We need to remember and help others remember that we hold our collections in the public trust and that before we can preserve or interpret or digitize or publish or exhibit or study our collections we need to know what they are. I realize I am preaching to the converted here but until an inventory is an institutional priority rather than just the persnickety registrar's pet project your chances of success are compromised which brings me to my take home point number one. In order for a collection inventory to succeed it must be an institution wide priority early in my career I was given some sage advice when I was frustrated with leadership at that museum. Maureen you can't manage up and I have found that to prove true but with patience and fortitude you can sometimes persuade so let's build the argument never before have museums been held to such high standards of transparency accountability and best practices. In 2008 the AAM published national standards and best practices for US museums which summarizes and codifies decades of wisdom collected from the hundreds of museums that have gone through the rigorous accreditation process and any of you who work at accredited institutions know how rigorous it is. Among the 38 characteristics of excellence for US museums paraphrased are the following from the section on collection stewardship. First know what stuff you have know where it is and take good care of it. First and foremost an accurate inventory of your museum's collection underpins that fiduciary imperative to hold its collections for the public trust. However proprietary we may have come to feel about the objects in our and I'm making air quotes here collections they aren't ours they aren't even our museums. These objects belong to the present and future generations and are not ours to lose or misplace. Know where it is knowing what you have or what you are supposed to have is all well and good but unless you know where it is you can't very well take good care of it. An inventory of the collection identifies objects that require conservation or those that require improved storage conditions to prevent future or to mitigate current deterioration. An inventory can identify objects that pose a hazard to the rest of your collection for example nitrate photographic negatives or to museum staff for example taxidermy specimens preserved with arsenic so that these objects can be segregated or otherwise stored appropriately. Taking good care of our collections includes more than just the physical care research and interpretation of our collections can only happen when we know what stuff we have and where it is. Also sometimes in spite of our best efforts of emergency preparedness things go terribly wrong. An accurate inventory of the collection will support insurance claims when fires floods and other natural disasters happen and identifies missing objects so that appropriate measures can commence. Now not that you need convincing but here is some more ammunition for building that institutional priority. What collecting institution has enough of either time or money? These resources are finite. Think back over the last year and ask yourself how much time did you spend hunting for objects and storage that you knew were in there somewhere? An accurate inventory makes everyone's life on a day-to-day basis so much easier and more efficient. If yours is a state that has old loans or abandoned property legislation an accurate inventory will identify objects that may have languished in your storerooms for years or even decades and will trigger an effort to resolve the situation. As was discussed last week in Bev Belchers. Yes. Yes. Excuse me. Oh don't move away. Yes. We're moving. Okay. I will. Right. Thank you. Okay. Sorry. I'm also in a swivel chair so I'll stop swiveling. So if you're in a state that has old loans or abandoned property legislation an accurate inventory will identify objects that may have been languishing in your storerooms for years or decades and trigger an effort to resolve the situation. As Bev Belcher mentioned in last week's webinar you need to document when an item is found in your collections to establish the not later than this date. If your institution is part of a larger organization state or local government college or university you may need to comply with its internal audit requirements. And if your collection includes or might include Native American artifacts they are subject to the reporting requirements of NAGPRA the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. P.T. Barnum famously said that there's no such thing as bad publicity but I'm not sure that most museum professionals would agree. Many of you may remember a story that was reported worldwide in 2006. I'm reading from the front page of the Washington Post. President Vladimir Putin ordered top officials to conduct a nationwide inventory of 50 million artworks at Russian museums concerned that treasures may be missing following the theft of $5 million worth of valuables from the Hermitage. Russian authorities say that only a quarter of the country's artworks have been inventoried since a check began six years ago. The first such survey since the closing years of the Soviet Union. The $5 million worth of valuables became known missing only after a routine inventory last fall. Officials realized that several drawings had disappeared when nine of them worth millions of dollars were sold in June at Christie's. So I'm pretty sure nobody's board wants to read about their museum in such a way. This sort of publicity is not going to inspire confidence or continued support from your donors or your lenders or peer review or funding agencies or a state's attorney general. Okay enough about why. As I said I realize I'm preaching to the converted. Let's talk about the types of inventories. Inventory is one of those words that everybody thinks they know the meaning of until you start talking to somebody else and realize that they have a very different understanding of what an inventory is. So I'm going to talk about the three most common types from the most limited to the most comprehensive. A random or spot inventory is very limited in scope. Its goal is to verify the location of a representative sampling of objects thereby checking the reliability of a museum's location records. An ongoing program of random spot inventories may also act as an effective deterrent to insider theft. Sorry trouble advancing this next one there. A partial or a section by section inventory is limited in its scope to some logical unit such as objects on display, objects in one particular storage area or your highest valued objects. Gallery reinstallations and storeroom renovations are good examples and they present good opportunities to conduct partial inventories. Although valuable and certainly no better than no inventory at all, partial inventories by definition cannot be definitively reconciled against your museum records. The most comprehensive inventory is called variously a complete inventory or 100% inventory, a wall-to-wall inventory, a baseline inventory or some combination of all of the above. Whatever term you prefer the goal of what I am going to call for the rest of this webinar a complete inventory is to document the location of every object that is in or is supposed to be in the museum's custody. This will include objects in your permanent collection of course but also objects that are owned by the museum but not accessions such as study or handling collections, objects in temporary custody such as loans for exhibition or on approval and long-term loans. Similarly a complete inventory will confirm the location of objects that are not on-premises, those that are out on short or long-term loan perhaps in commercial off-site storage or otherwise off-site for official purposes. The benefit of a complete inventory is that it can be authoritatively reconciled or justified against the museum's records identifying number one records for which no object was located and number two objects for which there is no documentation. I'll talk about reconciling the inventory later. I'm going to be concentrating on the house of undertaking a complete inventory as these same principles apply to partial end-spot inventories as well. Now I know the impulse is to grab a clipboard, a pad of paper, a fistful of pencils and just do it but truly and you probably already know this every minute you spend planning an inventory is going to save you hours in implementation. The first step is to determine the purpose and the scope of your inventory and to articulate this succinctly and in writing. This is going to be a long project and questions are going to arise and decisions are going to have to be made throughout the course of the inventory and having a carefully conceived and articulated project plan is going to guide you and keep you on track. The best place to start will be with your collection management policy and ideally a good collection management policy is going to include an affirmative statement that the museum shall inventory its collections on a regular basis and will offer general guidelines on the appropriate frequency and type of inventory for example weekly or monthly random inventories or an annual section by section inventory to achieve 100% over the course of every three or five years or perhaps a 100% inventory every ten years and a collection management policy will detail what actions shall be taken with respect to missing objects and undocumented objects. You don't have a collections management policy or perhaps it's hopelessly out of date or incomplete. Honestly, I strongly recommend that you get that taken care of before you start thinking about an inventory. Unless your museum's collection is very small in which case you are lucky, a complete collection inventory will almost certainly constitute a disruption in your day to day operations. Success is going to depend in large part on the cooperation of much if not all of your museum staff. As I said in take home point number one, you must have top-down support and this is where a well-crafted collection management policy that has been approved by your governing authority, emphasis added, is your greatest ally. Those of you who have taken all of these webinars or all of the webinars offered in this series will notice that we all have a handful of books in common on our resource list. This is another one. Buy it if you don't already own it. If you own it, read it. It will give you hypotheticals and actual legal cases that will help you build that institutional support. Okay, let's assume you have gotten to go. In other words, you have institutional support for the project, at least in theory, the question everyone wants to know. How long will it take? How much will it cost? Well, the million dollar question. Unfortunately, there is no quick easy. One size fits all formula for calculating this. Our collections are so different. The cultures at our institutions are so different. But first of all, at minimum, you need to determine scope. You need to define what a standard inventory record is going to be made up of. Now, in general, a very basic record will be concise and include at least the accession, the unique session or inventory control number, the current location of the object, the staff member who is confirming the location and the date. But depending on the goals and scope of your inventory, it may also include a brief condition assessment, direct digital image capture, maybe confirming or taking missing dimensions. An assessment of storage needs does an object need a storage mount or backing or new hardware. You may want to document all of your object accessories, such as frames or mounts. Something I neglected to put on the slide here is whether or not you will barcode. And that is a very big question too big for today's webinar may be a topic for a webinar in the future. You may also want to confirm your tombstone information about the object. Of course, here the line between an inventory project and a catalog project begins to get fuzzy. Now, obviously, the more ambitious your inventory is in scope, the more time and resources it will require. However, the additional investment required to broaden the scope of the inventory may repay itself many times over in the long run. For example, let's say you know that in three to five years you're going to be moving your collection to another location. In that case, taking or confirming your measurements or barcoding at the time of the inventory would be money well spent. Direct digital capture, that is also a very big issue and too big to treat in any depth today. What I will say that is that at Princeton, if I had looked for funding and institutional support for an inventory that did not include photographs of everything in the collection, I would not have been successful. Digital images was the carrot that got the money to do the hard work of the inventory. So now you need to think about your planning assumptions. What resources or what constraints are in play? Will it be possible for you to close galleries or freeze your storage areas? Will it be possible to impose moratoria or limit activities such as exhibitions, outgoing loans, etc., or must museum continue business as usual during the inventory? I will tell you this proved to be the case at Princeton as we had a relatively new museum director and the idea of turning galleries over to the inventory project was just a deal breaker. Actually, I understand why. Is it possible to divert and dedicate existing staff to the inventory or will you be hiring dedicated team term staff? Will you rely on inventories or volunteers? Well, inventory staff work independently or in teams. That's a big question. Best practices dictate that you work in teams of at least two, one of whom should be a paid staff member rather than an intern or volunteer for risk management purposes. And also it takes two people to safely handle some objects and I would add it cuts down on boredom and errors as you can spot check one another. And then the same, you know, another question that we grappled with was would staff have very specialized duties or would they be cross-trained? You know, would you have an art handler or registrar and a photographer or would you have three technicians that could do all of those things when they needed to? In the end, that's what we decided and it actually proved quite effective. Logistical considerations. Is there enough elbow room in your storage area to allow for objects to be examined and documented in situ? Or will objects need to be moved out of storage in order to do so? Can you dedicate non-storage space, for example a gallery, as an inventory area for collections that can be easily moved? For example, cylinder boxes full of works on paper. This is not a small consideration and in fact was one of the greatest impediments to the success of the inventory project at Princeton. We had long outgrown all of our, you know, numerous storage areas. We had objects in commercial off-site storage and we were planning to build a dedicated purpose built off-site storage facility on a remote Princeton campus. But that was a few years to come and in the meantime the storerooms were too crowded really to store objects safely much less have a team in there with a photo stand and a laptop computer etc etc. You also need to look at what equipment you have on hand, what you might need to buy, documentation. What is the status of your collection records? Are you going to be using your paper records or electronic records? Now assuming that you have a collections management system is there a record for every object in your museum's custody or does retrospective data entry need to happen? Will you enter inventory data directly into your collection management system? In other words, is your museum wireless and do you have or can you purchase laptops? Or will you be using your CMS to generate checklist by location or collection etc. and you will annotate those and then retrospectively enter the inventory data into your system? Oh but my museum doesn't have a collection management system. Well you have my sympathy. This for me seems like something that maybe should come before you undertake a full collection inventory. If your collection is you know I don't know if you had more than 5,000 objects I would think that a collection management system was kind of imperative and that acquiring that and populating it with the information from your paper records could arguably be considered a higher institutional priority than an inventory. Now if the acquisition of a CMS is completely out of the question for you for the foreseeable future I would suggest that maybe you consider using Excel or some other spreadsheet program as a temporary measure as that allows you to capture information in table form which then can eventually be uploaded to a collection management system. To digitize or not to digitize? Well it's a big question too big for this webinar as I said but the benefits I do think are substantial. Princeton decided to go a fairly ambitious route but there are ways that you can digitize your collection with a point and shoot camera rather than doing direct digital capture, managing files, renaming conventions, uploading images. This is all very complicated but I do think that more and more the public has begun to expect this. Again at Princeton the students for what their parents were paying tuition for simply expected that like the library they should be able to sit in their pajamas in their dorm room at three in the morning and browse our collections and that was not the case so again that became the carrot that drove our decision to digitize as we conducted the inventory but it really will slow you down it really will make your project much more complex it will cost much much more so again this depends very much on the nature of your institution, your budget, and your museum mission. Once you've grappled with these and the other imponderables specific to your collection and institution it's time to conduct several trial runs through representative sections of your collection. Track how long it takes to inventory cylinder boxes full of matted works on paper for example versus large pieces of furniture versus paintings on display in your gallery versus drawers full of dinosaur bones. Do not forget to take into account the time necessary to process your digital images if you're taking them or download barcode readings if you are barcoding or to update your collection management policy if you're working from lists. This exercise will almost certainly bring to the fore questions you had not previously considered and otherwise make obvious any faulty planning assumptions problem solve conduct more trial runs eventually you should be able to extrapolate a more or less accurate estimate of how long the inventory might reasonably take. This time frame can always be condensed by dedicating more staff or modifying other of your planning assumptions. Expect the unexpected staff turnover the arrival of a large bequest the need to empty a gallery because of a roof leak you name it will happen whatever you come up with as your predicted time frame add a contingency the larger and more active your institution the larger the contingency should be. Unless you've concluded that you are able to conduct the inventory by yourself you have everything you need and you can accomplish the inventory during the course of your normal working day. I have written in my notes here stop laughing. I'd suggest you put together a proposal with a timeline and a budget. This will help you or will force you to answer all the questions for yourself that your boss or your board or your umbrella institution will be asking and to conform the basis for grant applications. The main benefit of producing a professional proposal is that it educates up and puts the responsibility to ensure that your museum is compliant with current best collection management practices where it belongs in other words on the directors or the board of trustees desk fundraising. This is a subject again for another webinar it's not my area of expertise we did apply for an IMLS grant for to fund some of the inventory that happened at Princeton and that was successful but again I had the great good fortune of just being able to go to the university leadership and argue this case and they gave us quite a bit of money. So now you have a basic strategy you have the financial and human resources to embark but you still have a lot to do before you can actually start inventorying your collection. First of all you need to get your records organized. If you're going to enter data directly into your collection management system you need to make sure that there is a record for every object that you are supposed to have. We spent the first year of the inventory project at Princeton what we call project year zero doing retrospective data entry and doing a great deal of data scrubbing so that we could get meaningful results from queries. We designed queries and data entry screens specific to the project. If you use a collection management system such as the museum system you know this is these are very complicated databases with multiple data entry screens and what we didn't want to have happen was the inventory team having to move from one module to another module from one screen to another and so we designed a data entry screen that was specific to the inventory. If you're not going to be putting data directly into your collection management system and instead you're going to be annotating lists and retrospectively updating your collection management system you still need to design some meaningful queries so you can pull the information out of your database. If you don't have in-house IT support generally your vendor for your CMS should be able to help you. Now if you don't have a collection management system and you're going to be using Excel or some other sort of a spreadsheet application you want to figure out which fields of data you're going to collect. You want to figure out how you're going to store that Excel file it will become a very important and sensitive document. If you have a you know if there's a single standalone computer where you're going with that document is going to live you know how will that be backed up how often should the document be password protected I would say yes and then in order to keep your data uniform you want to employ the drop-down menus that are possible you know whatever fields where that's possible in particular location so that typos won't creep in and render an object impossible to find. So here as I can see that it's small on my screen but this is just a sample record of the kind of data that you might be collecting. You know you want to be able to sort by medium because presumably your storage areas aren't going to be organized that way so this would constitute sort of the bare minimum of the information you would be collecting. But take home point number two is you need to work from your records to your objects but not the other way around. If you work if you go into a storeroom and start making a list of the objects that you find in cabinet B shelf C and you update your collection management system you aren't necessarily going to find the things that are missing. So I would say start from your records and move into your storage areas. Organize your storage areas before you get started put away all those things that you set down temporarily five years ago. Get your shelves organized the neater and more logical there that they are organized the faster your inventory is going to go. You need to create a location authority for all of your storage and gallery locations and you need to physically label all of them whenever it's practical to do so. So here is a sample location authority. You need to know which building you're in if your collection happens to be in more than one building. At Princeton we had collection items and buildings all over campus so we actually had quite a number of buildings in our location authority. Again use your drop-down menu so that you can avoid typos. Do that also if you're working in Excel. Develop written guidelines and protocols for your inventory staff that include documentation guidelines, vocabulary and location authorities, art handling guidelines, et cetera, et cetera. You are going to have staff turnover if your project lasts any amount of time. It also is very easy to forget sort of what it was you all decided about taking dimensions for works on paper. Were you going to only take the sheet dimensions or were you also going to take map dimensions and also the image dimensions. These are the kinds of things that belong in your manual. Build your team, hire new staff or volunteers and retrain staff who are being sort of redeployed to the project. Traditional best practices suggest that inventory staff work in teams of two or three. An art handler, a reader who refers to and verifies or amends current object record and a scribe. If you're doing photography that person might also be the photographer. The potential advantages of this model are efficiency, enhanced security, quality control and boredom prevention. Especially if team members are cross-trained in all functions and can rotate roles. But cross-training also is helpful when team members are out on sick or on vacation or you have turnover. Too large or too specialized a team may result in the hurry up and wait syndrome where one or two staff members stand by idly while the others work resulting in efficiency, boredom and both. Experiment with the number of team members and configurations of functions to find the best fit for your collection. And this is going to vary within your collection. At Princeton we found that it was most efficient for works on paper to have the dual location on it first and then have the photography happen afterwards. Now you can go. All the planning and preparation hopefully the inventory itself will seem like a breeze. Inventory staff should proceed systematically through all the galleries and storage areas inspecting documenting objects in their locations. In other words as i said before matching objects located to object records and not vice versa. A common approach is to use your collection management system to generate lists of objects by location which can then be verified or amended during the actual shelf inspection. At the end of each day or week or completion of a certain storage area or unit the collection management system is then updated. This assumes of course that you are not starting entirely from scratch and that your CMS contains more records with locations than not. But if this is not the case you may instead choose to generate lists by curatorial area or object type and annotate this list with object locations as you move through the collection. Entering or verifying locations directly into your collections management system obviously will eliminate or minimize the need to produce hard copy lists and instead queries by location or object type can isolate the pertinent object records. You're going to need to identify tag and perhaps even physically isolate objects that pose problems such as illegible or incorrectly numbered objects or duplicate objects or objects with no numbers or missing records or missing components. Do not get bogged down trying to solve these problems during the course of the inventory. These are the things you'll work out at the end of each day or week or month or you could assign this duty to a project manager who can work in tandem with the inventory staff. Once you've got your momentum going you really don't want to go off track. So here's my last take home point. The easiest part of conducting a collection inventory is the actual conducting of the inventory. All of the planning, the fund raising, the strategizing was in my experience anyway the hardest part of the project and at least once we got started it felt like we were actually doing something. Even so expect fault starts as the old adage goes if you want to make God laugh make plans you will undoubtedly revisit some of your planning assumptions you'll make adjustments throughout the course of the project. That's why you built those contingencies into your estimated time frame. In a perfect world your inventory will result in a one-to-one correspondence of objects located to object records. More likely your inventory will result in a group of objects that lack records no records that last lack objects sorry and a group of objects that lack records. Now in a nearly perfect world there would be a one-to-one correspondence between these two groups and you will be able to match undocumented objects with a record for an object that was not found. So in the case of objects this was something that happened at Princeton many objects had never had their accession number affixed to them or tags on loans had gone astray. Unfortunately even after you've done this it's likely that you are going to be left with the vexing problems of missing objects or objects lost in inventory and undocumented objects or objects found in collection. Again your collection management policies should offer guidance on what actions to take in response to these problems. Museums are generally wary of advertising the fact that collection objects have gone missing. Wishful thinkers hope that the objects will turn up eventually and the publicity adverse may worry about accusations of negligence incompetence or even malfeasance. While most specialist fine art insurance policies will honor claims made for objects lost through quote mysterious disappearance few museums are likely to file such claims as doing so would likely negatively affect its renewal terms and premiums. As a result some museum decision makers may conclude there's nothing good to be gained by transparency in this area. However without timely documented due diligence a museum may not be able to recover works of art that surface sometimes years after a loss is discovered it will almost always be in a museum's best interest to err on the side of transparency and pursue any suspected loss aggressively. But again that is the subject for another webinar. Undocumented objects that are discovered in the course of an inventory and which cannot be reconciled against existing museum records constitute the complementary problem objects found in collections or FIC objects. Because the museum has no evidence that it holds title to these objects they exist in a collection status limbo that limits how they may be used cared for or disposed of. If you can't prove that you own it you cannot get rid of it. Here's another one of those books that's on everybody's list buy it it's a great resource. Okay congratulations you have conducted a complete collection inventory and it has been painstakingly reconciled. You've taken appropriate action with respect to missing objects you've documented all your found in collection objects you have taken a well-deserved vacation and received a generous pay raise but now it's time to maintain the inventory. Now it's time to ensure that the significant human and financial resources invested in the inventory were justified by putting systems and procedures in place to maintain it. The good news is it's simple the bad news is it's not easy. The formula is record object movement at the same time you move an object update your records as soon as possible thereafter and do it 100 of the time. Alas until RFID becomes ubiquitous or new technologies emerge that track object movement passively all approaches to location and inventory control ultimately is going to rely on or be thwarted by the human factor. When that object is moved the staff member that moves the object needs to record at least the accession number the old location the new location the date of the move and the name of the person moving the object. You may also ask for a brief description of the object since mistakes are sometimes made writing down accession numbers the reason for the move and the estimated return date. Now the object movement record can be made in as many ways as there are objects to move. A handwritten notation in a bound object movement log specific to every storage area or every authorized art handler would be a very simple method. A self for those of you who love forms a self-carbon form designed for this purpose with one copy left in the place where the object was one object traveling with the object and one copy being filed and or used to update the collection record is another method. You could enter it directly into your collection management system of course this only works if you have laptops or if you're using a barcode reader you need to read the old location and then read the new location and then keep your records updated. 100% of the time this is where those best laid plans go awry. It's the rare museum that can can claim sufficient staff for hours in the day to adhere to best location and object movement control practices at all time. However you can increase your chances of doing so if you limit access to your storage areas it's worth stating the obvious the fewer staff members that have access to and are authorized to move collection objects the smaller your margin of error. This is again something that belongs in a good collection management policy. Develop procedures but do that please with the staff members that move the objects. Don't tell the preparators or the art handlers what you want them to do. Work with them, shadow them, find out how they work and then work together to come up with simple and convenient methods for them to track objects. Write all this down, share it widely, review and revise them often and try. I know it's not always in your control. Try to make the time. Finally and I'm two minutes over time. I realize keep it simple. The simpler your method for keeping your inventory maintained the more likely it is to be complied with. Be relentless in the education of your colleagues about the importance of maintaining an accurate inventory and sooner or later everyone will experience firsthand the wonder of an accurate inventory. They will go into storage looking for an object and it will be right where it's supposed to be. Thank you. That's, this concludes my prepared remarks. So okay I'm going to I'm going to ask questions. So how do we tell historic site or owners such as cities, counties, states to impress upon them the importance of the inventory when they buy the site? Okay that's a great question and I don't have much, I've never worked for a government or state agency but I would be inclined to go to the law, the statutes. I'm sure there is something there about the you know the legal responsibility to care for taxpayer objects or assets and try to sort of use their own laws I won't say against them but in order to educate them. Okay on there was a question is the legal primer for American museums only or does it apply to other places? The legal primer is specifically about its American law but the authors do talk about some foreign laws. What I would say is that the principles that are discussed in there I'm sure are applicable to other nations but it is written specifically with US museums in mind and the case studies that are given are for the most part from the perspective of an American museum. Okay I'm going to try to sort this out. There were a lot of questions about collections management programs and using them for inventories or putting the inventory in an Excel spreadsheet or different inventory I mean different CMP programs and so I'll kind of bring those up as we get to them. Sure. One says our collections management program is vague on the schedule of inventories. So how do you... Right. How do you prioritize it to staff wise when you have a large collection and one staff member? Yeah that's tough and you have my sympathy. If a collection management policy a good one will always have a statement toward the end about how often the policy will be reviewed and revised. It's usually sort of three to five years. If there's nothing like that in your collection management policy you know that's a good reason right there to revise it. And then during the course of revising the collection management policy you know which is a Herculean task but that's where you can discuss how feasible it is for your particular institution and get something in there that may in the end prove to be aspirational but not attainable. But the trick is to make yourself accountable to yourself. So that's what I would say to that one you know if if your policy is vague on inventory it probably needs to be revised. And you know if your institution is accredited or is thinking about becoming accredited this is absolutely necessary. They won't even consider your application I think unless you have a collection management policy that has been approved by your governing authority. There were a lot of questions about what's the difference between the survey and an inventory. Well so survey usually is in the context of conservation or preservation and you know again whether or not you expand the scope of an inventory to include a brief general statement on the condition of either specific objects or you know portions of the collection you know that's a very individual basis or individual decision. It again will kind of slow you down. It requires a fair amount of expertise on the part of your team. Princeton we actually hired contract conservators to come in and train the team in terms of what to look for in the various collections but you know generally when we use the word inventory what we really mean is a location audit. You know so we are simply noting the location of where the thing is but to my mind since you have to go through storage and you have to touch the object to do that you know wouldn't it be more efficient to expand it slightly and maybe also say you know oh this object is broken in half or oh you know this painting has lifting paint or or whatever and then that can become so at Princeton the other thing we were anticipating was to on the to piggyback on the end of the inventory would be to do a real conservation survey of the collection and the inventory then sort of became will become the platform that that will spring off of I don't know if that answers your question. Yes I think so. Then there was another question about what's the difference between a catalog and an inventory? Oh yeah so an inventory is sort of just the facts ma'am so one painting with this number on it that would be an inventory record but the title of the painting or the to confirm the artist's name or to make a note that there is a painting on the verso of the canvas that is all sort of ancillary information that is very interesting maybe the way to draw the distinction is if that if the information is something that a curator is particularly interested in they'll you're sort of moving into the realm of cataloging and inventory is really you know I have one widget here it's carved of wood it's on the shelf and this is how big it is. Okay before we go on I just want to remind people before they stop dropping out some of you were very quick to send me who was with you last week and I haven't sent out my request about that which I'll do this afternoon and then later this week I'll send out a request of who's with you today and then I need to sort all of that out and I will send out who has the credly badge so just so you know what's going on with me I was gone over the weekend I just got back last night so I'm late with that and I'm really pleased at the number of people we've had taking this course that so then there's a long series of questions about using past perfect or using file maker pro or using other kinds of of collections management software to facilitate inventory and and using excel and dumping it back into your software so that's uh you could maybe make a general statement about that. Sure um you know I am I'm all for automating as much as possible because it's faster and also it minimizes human error so certainly you know if you say export your records from your CMS into a excel file and then you update the locations on your excel file and then you then you know import those files back and back into your collection management system you know that's a great way to do things and that's how in fact I do things down at a telea's storage facility because things it's like Oz things come and go so quickly down there much faster than in a museum so it's impractical really to down there to be doing it directly into a laptop it's much faster to change things um in excel and then upload the the the data you know we're in the realm what's what's happened with museum registration in the 30 years I've been uh had the word register are attached to my name uh is that our jobs have become increasingly dependent on IT staff and you know really you need to have again some sort of institutional support shouldn't necessarily be trying to figure out all the technology yourself if at all possible but I realize that's a a financial consideration for many you know smaller institutions um then there was some discussion about vocabularies and where to find vocabularies well so when I'm talking about uh location authorities there I'm you know you're making those up right those are going to be based on your building so um you know so storeroom one cabinet six shelf c you know but the point is you need to go through all your storage areas first and figure out what you're going to name all of those locations and then keep those in some sort of hierarchical level um so that's what when I'm talking about um location authorities that's what I'm talking about there in terms of vocabulary I'm talking about uh categories that you might be using in your collection management system to sort objects so uh you know paintings versus sculpture versus works on paper um the or uh your cultural classifications your geocultural classifications you know Asian art European art you know that sort of a thing and that's going to be particular to each institution but what you want to be able to do is to sort your records in a meaningful way and that means having some sort of control vocabulary in place I hope that helps okay there've been some questions from smaller institutions uh that are on the lines of if it's the first time you're doing an inventory wouldn't you have to start from the shelves and then go to the records no it's that I you know I know it seems counterintuitive and uh that was a rookie mistake that I made a long time ago now it again it depends on what type of an inventory you're undertaking if you're doing a partial inventory and um you have no other records then yes you know go from shelf to shelf within that particular storeroom and then update your collection records but if you're doing a complete inventory uh you really do need to work the other way around you need um it's much more efficient uh to to to work from your records to your objects um and it's the only way you'll be able to to authoritatively justify that inventory at the end of the day on there's a question our storage area is a disaster should we clean it up and then conduct the inventory or try to do the inventory most of our records do not have a location listed for artifact storage uh that's I was going to say I bet Angola's uh a webinar which unfortunately I had a conflict and wasn't able to attend my my inclination would be to tidy up and organize storage first for one thing it'll just make it safer for both people and objects um and maybe that even means packing up some portion of the collections that could easily be packed up and moving it someplace else um I can't I really can't overemphasize um like insufficient space to do an inventory is such a speed bump when you're working and at Princeton again because we had such overcrowded storage conditions part of that year zero was trying to clear certain portions of the collection out of the storage areas before we even went in there and started working so um I would say tidy up make sure things are safely stored creates an elbow room and then start to inventory um there have been a lot of questions about what do you do with old numbering systems I I was the project manager for a huge inventory and I had to call it the number of different numbering systems over 50 years it was 37 oh really wow yeah and you lived to tell the tale um yet that's a yeah that's a good question I'm not sure I can answer it without knowing more information you know whatever number the object is marked with that's the number you use and you know perhaps a new system is in place and that object has a new number but the new numbers never benefit to it you know again hopefully whatever uh program you're using allows you to keep track of multiple numbers you know for example you know loan loan objects that are that only have loan numbers on them but which have subsequently been accessioned into the collection um you know you should be able to search on that loan number and find out oh this thing is actually accession um so that that's a tricky one on I'm gonna send you the whole we'll send you the transcripts of all the questions and then you can look over them and see if I've missed anything but this this might be good for ending on does anyone have good phrasing or reasoning for restricting access um I've tried a few things but the director and board members treat the collections asset as a bonus for friends and visitors oh lord have mercy well here here we are you know you can't manage up um you know if it's your director and your board members at minimum hopefully you could get them to uh agree that they would only visit the store room with uh a registrar or another staff member there um I hope they're not handling objects um you know you have to pick your battles this one I would say um is going to be a tough sounds like a one you can't win right off the bat again it's a matter of educating and um that's where things like best practices and that aam um standards and also um you know the aam uh directors website go to that amd.org I think they have a number of policy statements sort of white papers and I'll bet you can find some ammunition there again uh you know it's not just the registrar wagon his or her finger at them you know you're going to their peers and saying look you know even your peer organization thinks this is not a good idea it's a good way to let people know what you have so they know what to steal too I've seen that happen honest to god it just I was always amazed at the things that I had to tell people that I couldn't understand why I had to tell them but you know people don't know until they know so education is really a big part of the job right so um thank you so much Maureen I'm also going to put together a list of related past webinars that might be helpful and I'll post that when I post your recording and your handouts and any additional answers and like I said if you were at all four webinars you are eligible for a credley badge and so I will be asking who was with you last Thursday and then give me a couple days and I'll ask who is with you today and then give me a week or so to collate all those names don't worry it's coming um and I think this was great thank you so much thank you for participating in the series and uh we look forward to seeing you the end of the month for caravarchives and the beginning of november for food and then there's more coming we'll be around for at least three more years so we're here join the listserv all that stuff thank you very much okay thank you all and thank you Mike yeah thank you Mike