 Okay, over the next four weeks, we're going to discuss the essentials of collection management from the acquisition of objects for collections through their care, their use, and then their eventual deaccession and disposal. Okay, so in webinar one today, we're going to focus on what collection management involves and we're going to examine museums as systems. We're also going to look at how the museum's mission affects collections, particularly acquiring and accessioning objects. For this first section, we need to discuss some generalities and theories about collections management. But in the next three sessions after that, the last three, we're going to concentrate very much on the practical aspects of how to manage collections. So this first session will not have a lot of hands-on information in it, but the last three will. And the reason for this approach is it's important to know not just how to manage collections but why we manage collections the way that we do. So a little preview of the upcoming webinars. In webinar two, which will be 19th of February, we're going to look at the day-to-day organization and management of collections. And we are also going to look at registration and how collections are cataloged at collection storage and at storage environments. In the third webinar, which will come up on the 25th of February, we're going to look at access to collections, how they're used, and a lot more details about the documentation of collections. And in the last webinar in this series, in webinar number four, we are going to look at collections management policies, which are very important for managing collections, social issues and collections management resources, and training opportunities that are available to help you better manage your collections. I encourage everyone to participate fully in the class discussions on the website. So whether a class is taught online or face-to-face in a classroom, I'm a big believer that discussion among the participants is a critical part of learning. And so the more you participate and interact with your colleagues during this course, I think the more that you will get out of it. In addition to the webinar and the discussion each week, there will be a few assigned readings on the topics we discuss. And these are selected to cover in more depth some issues that we're not able to go into great detail in the webinar itself, as you can imagine. Collection management is a very large and complex topic, and we really can't discuss everything in just four webinars. There is also a course project I encourage you to participate in, and this will result in a needs assessment of your institution that you will conduct. So after each week's seminar, I ask people to submit a report to me about the assesses your institution's strength and weaknesses for the topics that we present in that webinar. And these reports will be confidential, they'll just be seen by me, and I will read each one of them. So you're not going to be making information public about your institution unless you wish to. If you would like to share those reports with your colleagues by posting them in the discussion, that's fine, and you will get a lot more feedback that way from all these strengths and weaknesses and what you might do to improve them. So we'll be doing this needs assessment, and we'll evolve from you as a short essay each week, and as we look at the topics that we have covered that week. To give you a little bit of background about me, just so you know where I'm coming from, I've worked in museums for 50 years. And although my background is natural history, I have taught museums collection management for more than 20 years to a variety of different sorts of people. My undergraduate degree is a degree in biology, my master's was in museum studies, and I have loved museums for as long as I can remember. And when I was 12 years old, I started my own museum in a corner of the basement, and that is a picture of me at 12, the young curator at work there in my basement museum. I started my professional career after college as a zookeeper, which is very much like working in a museum, and later was collections manager at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and from there moved on to the University of Kansas. And from 2001 through 2007 at the University of Kansas, I was director of the museum studies program, which I like to tell people sort of combines being a collections manager and a zookeeper all in one. Presently, I work as a consultant. I run a consulting company that I work mostly on policy issues, and I teach museum studies classes for Kent State University, the National University of Columbia, and museum study LLC, and do a lot of workshops and things. So I still enjoy working in museums very much. And I catch up here, because I like to work with collections, I also have a volunteer job. I am the associate curator of collections of the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum and Art Gallery at Kent State University, which is near where I live. Because this is a very small museum, I get to do a little bit of everything from cataloging and rehousing the collection to helping with exhibit planning and research, painting the gallery walls, things like that. And I enjoy this, I work as a volunteer whenever I don't have other contracts, because I really like working with collections. The collection there is interesting, because it's quite different from most. It's about 18,000 specimens of rocks, minerals, and fossils, a little more than 300 paintings and prints and works on paper that depict the extractive industries of Pennsylvania, so oil, gas, coal, and that sort of thing. And then there's a collection of miners, lamps, and safety equipment. So this is a really unusual collection and allows us to do some really interesting and interesting exhibits. Getting to do everything, of course, is both a curse and a blessing in a smaller cultural institution. I always advise my students that they can go to a big institution and become a specialist and understand what they do in great depth, or they can go to a small institution and get to do a little bit of everything. And I think both have their advantages and disadvantages. And I think it's really pretty much the same, the advantage in a small place is you get to do everything, the disadvantages that you have to do everything. But I do like working in museums, whether large or small. So before we get started into the meat of today's topic, I want to ask you two questions. And so if you can type your answers into the box, Susan will collate these, and we will deal with your answers to these questions later. The first question is, what is a collection? How would you define a collection? And the second question is, what do you think collections management is? So if you can type in your answers, we will come back to these in just a few minutes. So let's get started here into the meat of the course with this thing about what do all museums have in common, because museums can appear very different based on their collections, but actually museums have more things in common than they do different. We all start with a bunch of objects that we acquire for our collections, and we take those and we make some sort of list. We initiate the process of documentation from those objects. We then decide which of the objects go into the collection and which don't. So we have to make these accessioning decisions. The next thing that all museums do is we identify the objects, we authenticate them, we evaluate them, we accession them, we catalog them, we put numbers on them, we mark them, all those things that we do in order to get things ready for the collection. Those objects are then labeled, and they are supported in some way, and they are moved into storage or put on exhibit. The next thing that happens is that they are documented, and of course this is one thing that sets museums apart from other institutions is that we document things every step of the way. And then those things are used. Those objects are used for exhibit research or educational programs. And ultimately, most of the objects wind up deteriorating or being used up, and at some point they will probably all get to the deaccession. So I think these are the things that it's important to focus on as the commonalities of the way museums do each of these steps. It's a little bit different from one discipline to another, but we really are doing all of these things to our collections in museums, and these are where our great commonalities occur. So why do we collect objects and put them in museums in the first place? And if we want to really understand collections management, I think it's important to understand why we collect objects. And if we need to consider whether it's about accumulating and carrying stuff that's important or whether it's about the stuff itself. So we're going to start by looking at a little bit of theory about the importance of objects and the power of objects. So one question you might ask is, who needs theory? Well, we all do because it's theory that gives us the basis for being able to critique what we do in museums. And without a theoretical basis, we wouldn't really have a deep understanding of what we do, we would just keep doing the same thing over and over. But I'd like to start with the idea that it has a significant impact on collections and it's something many of us are reluctant to talk about, but it is this belief that humans have that objects have power. And it goes back to the fact that as human beings, we are basically all storytellers. And the stories we tell don't just entertain, they also instruct. And these stories are critical for helping us make our way through the world. The stories we tell are reflected in the objects we use because as human beings, we navigate our way through the world using objects. And of course, this is a fundamental characteristic of humans that we find things to use as objects, we make objects, we take objects and make them into religious symbols. We use objects in all sorts of ways to orient ourselves in the world. From studies on anthropology, we know that this tendency to accumulate tools and religious symbols and use them as objects goes back a very long way as orientation aids. And from anthropology, we also know that collecting is a universal human trait. I have yet to find a culture anywhere in the world in which people do not at some level collect objects. So it's no mystery that museums evolved as a way for people to understand the world we live in by bringing harder to the chaos around them through the use of objects. And it's also important to note that what museums are really about isn't the objects and it isn't the people. It's the interactions between the people and the objects. And I think this is that we get down to the core of collections management. In museums, there's a big debate now about whether museums should be more for people or more for objects. I think that question is slightly wrong-headed because what museums are really about is how people interact with objects and what museums do is provide an opportunity for people to interact with objects. So I think this is a very important point. We go back into the history of museums and take a big historical view. We'll see that collections, of course, are much older than museums. And we have collections going back to our earliest human ancestors at least 3.3 million years ago, possibly longer. And we find that they were making and using collections of things. And although the earliest objects were probably gathered together to be useful, there are also other examples of war booty and objects were probably collected as means to revere the past. We, of course, don't know the reasons many of these collections were made, but it's pretty obvious that they were making 3.3 million years ago. Humans were probably making collections of things for more or less the same reasons that we are now. By the Renaissance, the cabinet's curiosities had become a means to understand the world around us. And here we have an example. This is the cabinet of Francisco Colozari from 1622. And here we see what looks like the hodgepodge of miscellaneous objects. But actually, if you look at it closely, you'll see that there is order in this. And what this is is an attempt by Colozari and by other collectors to understand the world by ordering their collections and putting things in some kind of logical grouping. So these early cabinets should be looked at more carefully than just depictions of curious places. And this is a more interesting one. This is the collection of Levinus Vincent in Holland in 1706. And this woodcut depicts, in many ways, a fairly typical cabinet of curiosities, except it's rather large. And there's some interesting things going on in this image if you look closely. There's a lot of visitors to the museum demonstrating, of course, that the cabinet was popular. And they're busy looking at paintings, textile samples, natural history specimens, documents, all sorts of things. There is a young boy who is working as an assistant over in the lower right-hand corner. So even at this stage of the game, museums needed to have assistance to help people. One of the more curious things about this depiction of a cabinet is in the lower left-hand corner. And there you see that not all the visitors were Europeans. There are two men dressed in what appears to be clothing from some Middle Eastern country. And again, this shows the importance of these cabinets and travelers that often look at these cabinets. And although the level of activity in the museum is probably exaggerated in this woodcut, the point is clear. Museums of this era were very popular for visitors to learn about the world that was beyond their doorstep. Well, by the 1600s, during the period that's commonly known as the Enlightenment, collections became tools of rational inquiry and objects of aesthetic understanding. And by the 1800s, the model for modern museums had emerged. It's an institution that collects, preserves, and researches objects. And this model is deceptively simple, but it was a model that has been exported around the world and developed in many different countries. So what we see is this model of the museum coming out of an Enlightenment era, being taken around the world to Asia, to Africa, to Latin America, and adapted to the needs of the diversity of cultures. And to me, that's one of the most interesting things about museums is how adaptable this concept of the museum can be when you see it played out in different parts of the world. And museums have remained these tools of cultural exploitation in the hands of colonial powers, but quickly, many of those returned into national museums. It's all a matter of how the collections are perceived and used. So here we see three examples. One is the Museo de la Revolution in Parquing Honduras, which was built by the survivors of the guerrilla army that battled the El Salvadoran government until the war ended eventually with a peace treaty. And the museum depicts their side of the war. There's also the National Museum of the American Indian, in which was the first time on a major scale that Native Americans finally got a chance to tell their story their way in a major museum. And then the last one in this picture is Femal National Museum in Thailand, which is another good example of the Western model of a museum being adapted to Thai culture, and in this case, also, it's a Thai architecture. So these are three very different museums that they all have one thing in common, and that is that they collect objects, they keep them, and they have to manage their collections, which is what we're going to focus on in this class. So theory, what theory? We're going to spend just a few minutes considering a bit of museological theory, and the reason for that is theory, as I mentioned before, does help us understand what we do and why we do it. And understanding these in collection management, keep in mind that theory is derived from practice, it comes from seeking to understand how and why we do things, but practice is also improved by the application of theory. If we did not have practice, the theory would have no meaning, and if we did not have theory, the practice would not change. So we need to have these two together. There is a little improvement in practice without the application of theory. There is a reading signed for today entitled Collection Care and Management, History, Theory, and Practice, where I go into a little more detail about some of the theoretical basics of collection management. We're only going to talk about a couple of things here, but if you are interested, you can follow up the references in that reading. And we're going to begin with looking at some vocabulary words that my friend and colleague, Dr. Kirsten Latham, likes to call the M-words. And the M-words, these are several terms that have been introduced by museum studies theorists. They're not widely used in the United States, but they are used in museum discourse worldwide. I have run into them in almost every place I've been outside the US, but very rarely within this country. But they're very useful words in discussing what we do in museums and these are also introduced in that chapter on collections management from the International Handbook of Museum Studies that you have for a reading. So the first of these is musial, which just means ob museums, but it more precisely refers to the field of reference in which the creation, development, and operation of museums as institutions takes place. So we might refer to a musial interpretation of an object rather than just an explanation as to what the object is. And a musial interpretation would involve using our knowledge of the object and materials that it's composed of, how it was made, when it was made and the culture that it came from to interpret it. So it's a lot more than just interpretation when we say musial, we are referencing all of the information that we accumulate about an object in a museum. Musialization is probably the most useful of these terms. This refers to the removal of an object from its natural environment and its transformation into an object in museums. Now we can't collect every object that we see around us in our museum, so why do we select certain ones for inclusion and what does that mean when we do pick one and decide that it is worthy of putting it into a museum collection? What happens when the object is put into the collection because in the collection it will no longer be used for its original purpose and we do continue learning more about the object over time. So this is all related to musialization and this is changing the nature of the object from whatever it was before into a museum object from which we can derive information about the world. And the last of these words I want to introduce is musialia. This is a general term that just refers to musialized objects. So it's the sum of the meaning the objects acquire. If you are interested in this and want to learn more about it, there's a very interesting reading called Key Concepts and Museology from ICOM. I'll send you a reference for that later this week. This is not one of the required readings, but these are, as I say, very interesting and I'm very useful terms to know. So these are all related to what we do in museums which can be summed up as meaning making. So in this photograph, you can see three people and they're sitting in a gallery and they're at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This is a really nice museum but are they really just sitting? Not really because they're looking at a video on the wall which is part of the art but they're also interacting with that video each in their own way and they are making some kind of meaning out of it, something that relates to their own lives and they are probably interacting with each other at least if they're not at this moment. They will when they get up and start talking. And that really is the essence of collections in museums is the meaning making that occurs as people interact with these musealized objects. Now we often hear that argument that museums should be less about things and more about people but I keep going back to this, no, we should be more about the interactions between people and objects. So for these interactions to take place we have to have good collection management systems that preserve the collections and the associated information and make them available. And this is really, as I tell my students, this is sort of the difference between antique store and a museum. In a museum we use the objects that have become musealia in order to understand the world. There is a danger though in over focusing on the object rather than on its meaning because in our daily practice it's very easy for us as museum professionals to focus too much on the object and forget that these objects need to be out in front of people and that people are going to interpret them in their own way and in many different ways. So we have to remind ourselves from time to time that this larger thing is taking place out in the gallery. And as 30 years ago, Wilcombe Washburn warned us about this and he said the object can become a fetish that if we merely worship it impedes our understanding of the object itself and its place in our society. Which is a good thing to keep in mind. We need to get these objects out, let people interact with them and see what happens. But one of my favorite museum theorists is Susan Pierce, who is a scholar from the University of Leicester in England. And she described that museum objects as having two different meanings. So we have material objects, which is the box and red. And there's two ways to look at these. One is that they have materiality because they're real physical things. And so these are those concrete and intrinsic relationships to the original context they came from and all the context they're placed in. The fact that they're museum, the objects are physical things that mean something. But when they become accepted into a museum, they also acquire constructed understanding. This means that we can group them into classatory groups, we can put them into taxonomies, we can do historical analysis of them, we can interpret what they mean, we can interpret history and life around us using these objects. So we have the material values, we have the constructed values, both on the same objects. And in Western society, the constructed understanding of those objects is superior to their physical value. And a good example of that is if you took a 19th century man's top hat and put it in an exhibit and said, this was a top hat from the 1800s, you know, people might be interested. If you said that was the top hat worn by Abraham Lincoln, then now you went to Ford's Theater, people would be far more interested because this constructed understanding is now applied to this object. So this is a lot of what we do in museums. Constructed understanding has been called a polysemic quality of museum objects because it means that they have multiple meanings. So when we manage our collections, it's important to remember that this constructed understanding is a higher value and that needs to be preserved. And again, that is a goal of collections management, is preserving those associations, that constructed understanding. So here's an example of an object becoming musealized and acquiring constructed meanings and what it means. I used to work at the University of Kansas and while I was there, they built the Robert Dole Institute of Politics, which many of us thought would turn out to be another one of these pork barrel things that you build to remember your retired senator from, but it worked out to be a very interesting institution for political discussions on campus and it's a very nice addition to the campus. Well, while they were in the early stages of building the building, we had the tragedy of 11th of September, 2001 take place. And so they modified the building slightly to bring in two of the twisted eye beams from the World Trade Center in New York. And so the picture on the right-hand side is those two eye beams in place in the entryway of the museum and they're right in front of a big stained glass representation of an American flag. So an artist could have been hired to create two authentic looking steel columns for much less than the cost and the bother of obtaining the original columns from the ruins of the World Trade Center and shipping them halfway across the country to Kansas. However, the fact that these are the actual eye beams from the World Trade Center, these were actually damaged as the buildings collapsed, means that they have this constructed understanding, the meanings that we make from them. This has been an extraordinarily popular exhibit and when this exhibit opened, of course that event was still very fresh on our minds and we had a line of people blocks long outside the door coming in to look at these twisted steel eye beams. And of course the eye beams themselves didn't have a meaning but because people knew where they were from, this helped them get this incident understood better in their mind. So this is a really good example of what happens when we musealize an object and preserve these constructed meanings and put it in a museum. And this is I think very important and easy to lose sight of in the day-to-day management of collections. So in your book, Museums in Motion, Edward and Mary Alexander wrote that many museums collect because they believe that objects are important and evocative survivals of human civilization worthy of careful study and with powerful educational impact. Whether aesthetic, documentary, or scientific, objects tell us much about the universe, the nature, the human heritage, and the human condition. And you know that's asking a lot for a bunch of objects or is it? Which brings us around to the question of what is a collection? So this is where we come back to what is a collection and let's see, Susan do we have some of the answers from people gathered together at this point? Okay, so a group of objects, these are some of your replies here so let me scroll up a bit. Collection be a group of similar objects, artifacts representing an institution's story, collection of a group of objects if something is documented, the sum total of the museum's objects. I'm not reading all of these, I just want to kind of scan over them to see what you all have been thinking about. A group of objects are images, touchstones to the past, a group of objects is something in common. Okay, these are all very good and there's probably going to be a lot more of them. What I'm looking for is though, is what is the difference between an accumulation of a bunch of objects and a collection specifically? So a group of objects that are held, a group of objects, things that have meaning to someone, I think we're getting much closer to what I was looking for here. Can you scroll down a bit on that Susan? I don't seem to be able to get the list to move down or possibly end at the end. Okay, so some very interesting replies. So I've got another question for you now and I'll take a look at this image. Is this a collection or is this an accumulation? And I believe we have this set up for a vote, is that correct? Okay, so let me know, do you think this is a collection or do you think this is a random accumulation of objects? And I'll give people a few minutes to weigh in on that and then we'll look at the results. Okay, we've got, okay, it looks like this point. It looks like we've got a random accumulation of objects is about 60%, a collection is about 40. So the majority at this point still say this is a random collection of objects. Very curious. And then now it's getting a little closer to half of you think that it's still over a half thing. This is a random accumulation of objects. Well, of course, this is a trick question as you probably suspect. This is in fact a collection and it is the archeological collection of a major museum in a unnamed Caribbean country. And at the time that I took this picture, this was the best they could do for putting things in order because they had very limited staff and very limited resources. And I am very pleased to say this collection does not look like this anymore. They were able to get the resources they needed to make this a much better looking collection. But the way things look at the outset can sometimes fool us. But I wanna really get at here with this question of what is a collection is that a collection is organized and that means a collection has some sort of order. And the order in the collection may only be recognized by the person who made the collection. It may be that anyone else looking at it doesn't see these relationships that objects have to each other. But if it's a collection, someone has collected those things because they see that they're related. And if they have order and they're organized, that means that objects have characteristics that allow themselves to be classified and named. So when going through the museum literature, you'll notice that there are very few attempts at defining museum collections specifically. There's some discussion of what collections are, but very few that define museum collections. And I like to go to a relatively obscure paper that provides a very good definition of a museum collection. And this was written by Nichols and Williamson in 2002 and Steve Williams was a professor at the time at the University of Baylor. And Nichols was one of his students. And they set out to write a definition that would separate museum collections from other collections. And their first criteria is that the collection has to consist of more than one object, of course, otherwise it wouldn't be a collection. The objects have to have order and organization, which means they have to have these recognizable characteristics. They have to be valued by people. And that's why they're in the collection, of course, because they are valued. They have to be collected with the intent to be preserved over time. The collections have to meet the institutional mission and goals. And this is an example where a museum collection is different from a collection in most other places. Then they also said that the object integrity and associated information are very important. So this means the integrity of the object and keeping its information associated with it, which is, of course, part of the process of museumization. And lastly, they said to be a museum collection, it should be maintained according to professional standards. So I think this is a very good definition of a museum collection, and this is what we will be working with now over the four weeks of this class. So this brings us up to our next question, which I ask you, which is what is collection management? Because we now have a definition of a museum collection, so let's see how you have defined collection management. So I will give Susan a moment to see if she can bring some of those answers up in the parking lot so I can take a look at them. Because the collections management means different things to different people. So let's see. Not getting any of your answers yet. Okay, I am not able to scroll down through the parking lot. Oh, there it goes, it's moving now. Okay, there we go. Thank you, Susan, it was there all along and I just missed it. So collections management is the means of establishing control over those objects and materials, the organization maintenance of collections, organizing a collection, care and cataloging, direct care of everything, the care given to the collection, these are all very good. Management is multifaceted, caring for our cataloging understanding, maintaining and preserving. Okay, so these are really, really good answers there and I think we're probably all in agreement on this. I like to use a more general definition, I like to say collection management is everything that is done to develop a collection, take care of the objects and make them available for use. Because I think developing the collection properly to serve the institutional mission is important, obviously taking care of them so we have them for a long time. And if we don't make them available, we don't allow that meaning making to take place. So that's why I like this definition. These basic principles in collection management are shared by all museums. It doesn't matter whether you're collecting furniture or painting or fossils, they're all about the same. And the collection for each museum does need to be defined. You have to know what your museum will collect and almost as important or perhaps even more important what your museum will not collect because every object you acquire requires resources to take care of. So let's go back a minute and look at the graphic that we looked at before and it's this one here. So this is what we said all museums had in common so we can boil this down to you select and acquire the objects you want for your collection. You take legal possession of them which is through the process of accessioning. You make a record of the object in associated information which generally falls under the rubric of registration. We assign a unique number to each object so we can identify it. We then place those objects in some kind of storage. We monitor the use of those objects over time and ultimately we then wind up the accessioning them. So these are the key issues in collection manager that we're going to talk about over the next few weeks. But a few more theoretical things before we can get into the practical. And one of them is we need to look at museums as systems. And no two museums are alike. Each has its own internal and external issues that affect how it functions. So if you really wanna understand how a museum works you need to examine it in context as part of an ever-changing system and part of a larger system. So by system we need a set of interrelated and interreacting components that are connected through direct and indirect relationships. And the traditional way of looking at things is to examine each part individually which if you look at through the history of museum literature or people have talked about cataloging storage of exhibition as if these were isolated things that we do with collection. So of course they are all interrelated. So what we do in the systems view is we look at how those parts interact. So I think this is a much better way to look at the role of collection management in the broader museum. The thing about systems is when a change occurs in one component that change to a greater or lesser extent affects all of the other components of the system. And of course this works through feedback. So it is the feedback through a system these changes as they adjust to each other that allow a system to remain stable over time. And for example in a museum system there might be changes made in how collection objects are interpreted for the public based on the way visitors evaluate exhibits. And of course that could change which objects are collected. It could change which objects are exhibited and how that could change cataloging priorities the way museum, the way objects are stored. So these things all are interconnected. We don't want to talk about them in isolation. What we need to keep in mind as we consider collections management is that all the components in the museum system including exhibits, visitor services, educational programming, conservation, administration development, all of these work together and react to one another. That's why I like to say that museum collections management is the only aspect of working in a museum that has a major effect on all the other parts because whatever we do in the collection does affect how the museum as a whole works. So museums of course are not isolated systems by themselves. They are also part of larger systems and they have to then change and adapt to that larger system. So these changes might be local, they might be national, they might be global. Most of the time when we see a museum that is in financial trouble or a museum that is closing this is because they have failed to adapt these changes and it may be local, it may be national and it may be global but in some way they have failed. So it's important for us in museums to try to keep them tuned with these changes in the larger system and as we discussed earlier it's this relationship between people and objects at the heart of the museum and in order to maintain that we need to be able to adapt to these changes. An object in the museum has many different uses and meanings, visitors may experience an object as meaningful, entertaining, educational, nostalgic or make some personal connection to it but museum workers might see the object in the context of its preservation, what it represents, that it's evidence of something, they might see it as a catalog entry as part of a story or a design element. So there's many, many different ways to look at objects. So what we need to keep in mind as we manage our collections is that other interpretations of the object are as important as those that we give it and keep in mind how these objects are interpreted by their users. So I'd like to take another poll here and in this case I want to know if your museum has a mission statement, does it have an acquisition policy, meaning a policy for what you're going to acquire, an accession policy meaning a separate policy for what you take legal possession of and do you have a de-accessioning policy and I'll give you a little bit to answer these because I'm curious to know how widely available these policies are in museums. Looks like almost everyone has a mission statement, that's running in about a little over 97%, about 60% of you have an acquisition policy, looks like about 42% have an accessioning policy and about 50% have de-accessioning, I'll give this to the minute or two more to come up. And I was curious about this because I think many of us have these policies, even if they're not written down as de facto policies, they're things that we sort of understand among each other but policies have a lot more power of course than they are written documents. So those numbers aren't changing a lot, we're still running about 97%, 98% mission statement, a little over 67% have acquisition policy, only about 41.8% have an accession policy and about 51% have a de-accessioning policy, so very interesting. All right, so we'll come back to those numbers again later in the course, so for now we'll go ahead and move on and we'll take a look at mission statement. So I'm glad most of you have one. The objects in the collection should help the museum achieve its mission and this sounds of course self-evident but it's actually a big failure I see in museums is they tend to wind up with objects in their collections taking up resources that in fact do not relate to the mission. So it's a good idea to review what you've got and your mission statement needs to make it clear both what you collect and what you don't collect and we will talk a lot more about policies in the fourth webinar and at that point we will address the fact that the best way to avoid de-accessioning is to have a good accession policy but the question I would like for you to think about now and for your essay this week is ask yourself does the museum's mission statement help you manage the collection? If the mission statement is something really vague such as the purpose of the quiet county museum is to tell the story of quiet county and its gentle people, that probably won't help you very much, right? Not a lot of guidance there. You want a mission statement that actually tells you what the mission does to guide in collections building. So a better mission statement might be the quiet county museum could change their mission statement to read understanding the past to build a better future which gives you a lot more direction. So think about what your museum's mission statement is and whether you feel it gives you guidance or how the collection should be built up what things should be collected and how it should be managed. Similarly, if you have an acquisition statement there are forces that are independent of the museum's mission that affect acquisitions of course and that has to do with things like the availability of the objects, the willingness of donors to give you things, the amount of money that might come into the museum for objects and political pressures and what have you. So those things are out there but you can't really control them but what we really want to think about with the acquisition is this idea that every object added to the collection has a long term cost. A lot of the administrators seem to think the cost of an object is the cost of its acquisition that once it's of course got a number on it and the accession and is on the shelf it no longer matters but as collections managers we know that's not true. These objects have long term costs because they still have to be cared for all throughout their length of their time they're in the collection. And of course museums can't collect everything so a museum collection is a selected microcosm of a vast array of available objects so we need to think carefully about what we're going to put into the collection. It's this process of selecting the objects for a museum that gives that object a greater value than the objects that are not in the collection. So this is how musealization works. So I have another graphic for you to look at here. All right, here we go. So this is musealization. So you can conceptualize it this way there is a large number, almost an infinite number of objects in the world and their values are assigned by the culture they come from so they have different values and things out there but they pass through a filter because only a subset of objects get selected for consideration for museums and as Susan Pierce likes to point out they should pass through a second filter because it's really even a smaller subset of objects that is chosen for inclusion in the museum. So there's a first filter is picking out those that have received to have value but that second filter is that smaller subset. So we can't collect everything so we have to figure out what to collect and what not to collect and so to do this we need these two good filters and these involve our good mission statement, acquisition policies, accession policies and a collecting plan because we don't want to waste our resources on things that we don't need to fulfill our mission. The overall term for the process by which an object becomes part of a museum collection is registration. So registration is how the museum establishes the right of ownership over something and we frequently refer to this as, I'm sorry, excuse me, we frequently refer to this as the legally taking title to an object although it's not like a car title, it's not a written document, we refer to that as it's taking the legal ownership and this registration is the process that also preserves the connection between the object and its information. Without the information associated with it, the object is not properly musealized and has very little value and object with that has no particular significance, no other correlation is probably not very desirable in the museum. So this means that a good museum registration system will enhance the object's interpretation because it will keep that information about the object associated with it as well as the further information that is learned as the object is musealized in the museum. A good registration system also assists in the object's preservation because it's the way we identify the object and because we know history about it and this will help us take better care of it. On the other hand, an act and a bad registration system and an inadequate one will result in loss of value to the object. Once we separate the information about what an object is, it's significant where it came from, from that object it doesn't have nearly as much value. So we want to be careful as we select these objects. First question to ask is the obvious one. Does it support the mission and goals of the institution? Will it be useful for use in an exhibition, education, research, or some other use in your museum? Is there sufficient documentation to be accessioned into the collection because not all objects have the amount of information that we want them to have. Is the object needed? It might meet all of the above criteria, but it might be a duplication of something already in the collection, something that we really don't need. Does the object have good provenance or history of ownership? And we'll talk about this more later in a subsequent webinar. Does the object pose a hazard to the staff or visitors? Some objects, as they deteriorate, produce, for instance, acidic vapors. Some of them produce radiation and become hazardous. So is this something that will actually be a hazard over time? Or is it going to be a hazard to the collection? If you have deteriorating plastic objects in your collection, those can actually harm other objects that are there. What about the expense of housing or conservation? It may be a really cool object to acquire, but the expense of getting it conserved are the expense merely of housing. It might be so large that it interferes with your ability to collect other objects for the collection or to take care of the ones you already have. Another consideration is, does the museum have sufficient resources to properly care for the object? So you should not acquire something which compromises the care of the remainder of the collection because museums do have a legal and ethical obligation to care for everything in their collection. And here's an example. This is this bright orange fiesta ware from the 60s. It's very collectible from the 30s rather than 40s. It's very collectible, but most of it produced between 1936 and 1944 is radioactive. Now, radioactivity declines over time, but if you have a lot of this fiesta, you're going to have to be very careful in how you house it in order to reduce the radiation hazard in your collection. So can you be confident the object will be used by your museum for an accepted purpose, like research, reference loans, education, exhibitions, exchange? Is it duplicating something that you already have in your collection? Is it going to be something that affects public relations in a negative way? For instance, a racist object might be something that is of interest because of its historical nature, but it also might be very sensitive to visitors that the museum is expending resources to preserve objects that are indicative of racism. And then there can be special consideration, extenuating circumstances that may affect the decision to require an object. For example, if your museum is a small history museum and it's the only museum in the community and it's offered objects that don't really relate to the mission, that aren't really in keeping with the guidelines, it still might be important as a community museum to accept things that are marginal because you do want to keep the support of your community and you do want your community to help you define how your museum works. So there may be special considerations as well. Deaccessioning is something we will talk about in more detail later. For now I just want to mention a few things about it. This is the opposite of accessioning. It's the permanent removal of an object from the museum's collection. Deaccessioning practice of this is as old as museums themselves, of course, but it can be very controversial. And in many cases today you read about deaccessioning in the press when it does become controversial. Disposal refers to what happens when we get rid of an object and it really should be a separate consideration from deaccessioning. But the things that are disposed of this may mean that they are given or traded to another museum, they are sold or they may be destroyed. There are many reasons that museums need to deaccession. And this is a tool that is used to manage the collection. And it can be a very critical tool. Part of this is that collections are dynamic, they're not static. Collections do grow and change over time. The retention of each and every object in a collection involves an ongoing expense for the museum and those are the cost, of course, of care and management. So we can't necessarily keep everything in our collections forever. Deaccessioning may also be a way to generate funds that can be used to acquire other objects that are more critical to the mission or more critical to the collecting plan. So we may remove things of lesser value to acquire things of greater value. We may also better serve the museum community by deaccessioning objects to another museum which can make better use of them than our museum can. And it also may be necessary to deaccession an object for purposes of restitution to a rightful owner or repatriation. So this would include stolen objects which should be given back to their rightful owner or objects that were imported illegally which shouldn't be returned to their country of origin. It could be things like Nazi-era artworks or materials covered by NAGPRA by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. What happens after deaccessioning, of course, is disposal. Disposal is a term used to describe what happens after deaccessioning and this is where a lot of the controversy comes from. Most deaccessioned objects are traded to another institution or given away. Occasionally some are sold, some are destroyed. And these are all perfectly good options for deaccessioning but each one needs to be very carefully documented and thought out before it is conducted. So make sure I get caught up here. There we go. If an object is sold, there are very few legal restrictions on how the funds that are produced from that sale can be used. But the American Alliance of Museums Code of Ethics states that funds generated by deaccessioning should only be used to acquire new objects for the collections or for the direct care of the collection. Now we won't go in at this point to the controversies over the use of funds. There are some other connecting to collections webinars on this topic which you can take a look at. One is the deaccessioning dilemma, laws, ethics and actions which was aired on 19th of November and another one is why do we need this insights and hindsight on deaccessioning. These are both really good and they are both available archives. So if you want to look at some of the controversies and some of the aspects of deaccessioning, you can look there. So this is going to wrap up the theoretical part of what we were talking about and our next three webinars are going to be devoted to the more practical day-to-day and zone management things. And don't forget that you have an assignment for this week and the first part of that is to of course read the readings. And then the second is write this report a short essay about your museum's mission, its acquisition, accessing the deaccessioning policies and whether you think those are useful or not and whether you think those are helpful or not for the managing of your collections. And at this point, let's see, we can take questions. So I believe Susan has been looking for questions and you still have plenty of time to type any questions. If you have anything that you'd like to ask at this point. There haven't been many questions yet but there were a couple of comments that I thought you might expand on. Angela Nellers said, acquisition versus accession is new to me. Okay, yeah, and that's new to a lot of people and museums acquire many things they do not accession. For instance, they might require objects they use only for an educational program or they might acquire things that are inauthentic that they use as props in an exhibit or something like that. So accessioning means you take legal possession of it, you make this a permanent part of the collection that you hold in the public trust as a nonprofit institution. Acquisition just means you acquire these things. So there's a major difference. Not everything that comes into a museum is taken legal possession out of the collection. So those are just acquisitions. Okay, and Carla Galfano said, I'm the one without a mission statement and Mary Jetkowski said, so why don't you have a mission statement? But we didn't get an answer to that. So maybe she'll answer now. Okay, and there are some really good resources out there for writing mission statements. There's some very nice publications and I find mission statements very difficult, so I don't do that, but there is some really nice help. And the problem is a lot of mission statements are so vague they are just not really useful. And what you want is a mission statement that is short but also says what your institution is all about. It can be very difficult to do. Yeah. In fact, Ashley Smith says, there is an issue with documents being so vague that they're really rather useless. Right. And Carla said it was a good question as to why they don't have a mission statement. Yeah, well, a lot of people, I think, get very disappointed with mission statements because they see badly written ones. But when you see a very well-written one, you realize this is very useful. It's a quick way to communicate to the press, to the public what you do, and it should give your staff guidance to set up then a more detailed collections plan and an accessioning policy to define what you have. But a good mission statement is remarkably useful. A poor one is not very useful at all and is, unfortunately, more common. Okay, there are a couple of questions about where do we turn in the report. So you will post the report on the Elevate website, which is the website for this course and under the assignment. And then it says, are the assignments due before the next webinar? Yes, please. And I will post the slides and the recording as soon as I have them. And so they'll be posted on the website. So where you find in today, instead of having the live event, it'll be the recording. And I'll post the slides as a handout. I see someone has asked what format we would like the assignment. And just as a short essay in any style you want, I don't want people to get all hung up on format and just write something that is clear and concise. And Laura asked report length, format word or doc or PDF. I found when we did our last class that PDFs were easier to read, that the website that we used for this was better. So that's if you can do a PDF, that'd be fine. And then I also wanted to say that so if you're aiming to get a credibly badge, which is one of the reasons we're taking this course, then you need to watch all the webinars and you need to do the assignments. And you can either watch the webinars live or you can watch them as recording. We have a way to monitor that people are watching them. So that's that. And if you have any other questions, you can always ask me. I'm happy to answer them. I see we have a question. What is an appropriate way to destroy artifacts after completing the accessioning program? This is really going to depend on the type of material that it is. The main thing in this destruction is you want to document that this destruction took place and most museums that have a destruction policy have it witnessed by someone outside the museum, maybe outside the staff, a board member, someone like that so that there is another witness that can just sign off on the documentation and that assures you that the artifact wasn't spirited away, sold illegally on the black market or something. That's just a transparency thing. If you want to destroy something, if it is in such condition it cannot be used, burning is probably a good way to do it. Some places bury them, some places break them up. It depends on the materials. You don't want to create a hazard in the process of destroying something that's been deaccessioned. And Ileana Holland asked, where will the readings be posted? They're posted in the handouts so you can find them there. And Guru Fateh asked if people can share their mission statements and maybe you can do that in the discussion. In the discussion. That would be a great idea. If you could, if you post your mission statement, would you please say whether you think it's useful or not? Right. And also include where you are in your institution. That helps too. I see we have a good example from Cedar City, Utah, from Ernesto Balderas of a mission statement and an educational and cultural resource to Southern Utah Museum of Arts, Drives to Foster Engagement and experiential learning for students of Southern Utah University as well as communities across the region through its permanent collections, diverse exhibitions and participatory experiences. I would call that a really nice mission statement. That will give you great direction for what to collect and what not to collect and how you would go about structuring exhibits. So that's a nice example. And John, you can look at Catherine Hayes right below. Oh, okay. Okay, I see. Mission statement. Let's see. Scrolling down here. He says, is a mission statement considered to be weak if it does not contain the idea of preservation to some extent within the mission statement? Oh, that depends on how you phrase it. I don't think it's necessary to explain every aspect of your museum and mission statement. And that might or might not be important to do. I would want to see a mission statement that didn't say that to say. But they don't all have to say everything. You want to keep them relatively short. Yeah. Ariel McManus from the Franklin Institute says, my mission statement, in the spirit of inquiry and discovery embodied by Benjamin Franklin, the mission of the Franklin Institute is to inspire passion for learning about science and technology. And see, that's interesting because that does not mention collections. And so does the Franklin Institute collect objects? Oh, yeah. And do they actively collect? I know in the past they had collections, but that's when I would wonder if that mission statement would really help you if you were a collection manager. It looks like Ariel is going to type something in. Oh, OK. OK, here we go. Yetter? OK. Nope, I haven't seen it yet. I see this one from Winslow Historical Society. Receives, preserves, and interprets information and artifacts representing the history and cultures of the Winslow area in order to engage and enlighten all visitors to the Old Trails Museum exhibit some programs. I like that one because of the emphasis, not just on artifacts, but also on information. But that associated information is very important. And then Mary Jack Kowalski has our mission statement, Historic Charleston Foundation is an advocacy organization advancing the mission of historic preservation. And historic preservation has evolved into more than a... Into more than a movement to simply save historic buildings. The Foundation has broadened its scope into balancing the needs of modern society with protecting the sensitive fabric of the historic district. I like the ideas there. If it was me personally, I think I would shorten that down and take the evolution of historic preservation part out of it and rewrite that as to the specific mission of the historic Charleston Foundation being this need to balance the needs of modern society with protecting the sensitive fabric of the historic district. Personally, I would look at it that way. And Mary says, because of the nature of our organization, the Preservation Society, our mission statement pertains more to the goals of preservation and advocacy instead of museums. And Ariel McManus came back and said, we do actively collect objects at the Franklin Institute. I always focused on more on programs in the museum. Here is the World Museum of Mining Mission is to preserve the rich historical legacy of mining and the related culture of Butte, Montana, and the surrounding region and to promote significant mining heritage by educating the public with a perspective toward total family interest. It's a very interesting one. Yeah. Now, you get a lot of variety in these, and I don't mean to be sitting here passing judgment on people's mission statements without knowing the institutions. So we're just taking a general look, and it may be that some of these are far better in terms of representing their institution than is obvious at first glance, because, of course, I don't know all your institutions. There are other mission statements here. Garfano, who is in Washington, and we know she's at an institution that now doesn't have a mission statement. She says, my former institution had a great mission statement. The mission of the Peabody Essex Museum is to celebrate outstanding artistic and cultural creativity by collecting, stewarding and interpreting objects of art and culture in ways to increase knowledge, enrich the spirit, engage the mind, and stimulate the senses. That's a very interesting one. Yeah. And Carly Manello says, our mission, the Eureka Tsuchi Nature Museum at Benedictine University strives to provide an educational environment in the Benedictine tradition that inspires all people to seek a deeper understanding and appreciation of the world's natural and cultural diversity during engaging exhibits, educational programs, and preservation of collections. I actually know that museum. I visited there back in the 90s. It's a very nice little university museum with a very, very long tradition of collection-based education. That's nice to see. Yeah. And then the Hayden Heritage Center, the mission of the Hayden Heritage Center is to engage, inspire, and educate the public by creating a sense of place in history with the preservation and exhibition of historic artifacts and information associated with the town of Hayden and the areas of West Routt County, Colorado, as well as to honor these individuals, families, and entities that have made an impact on the area's history and heritage. Are there any other questions from part of today other than your mission statement that anyone wants to get asked before we reach our ending time? I don't see any. Okay. Yeah, but people should... There have been several things of how long their essay should be. Yeah, not more than a page or two because it's going to be a lot of reading that you need to do. So I want you to keep, you know, a fairly short essay looking at the adequacy of these things, but you don't have to go into a lot of exhaustive detail. The correct answer is going to be how much you have to say about your institution. Right. I hate to put... I've found working with people that if you say something should be two pages long, you're going to have some people patting it out to get to two pages, and some people leaving out information to restrict it to two pages, and neither of those is right. If you can say it very shortly, that's fine. If you need more space, that's fine as well. Just say what you need to say. Yeah. Really, that's not a very satisfactory answer if you're the participant. So in the point of view of the instructor, that's what we're looking for. Yeah. Paul Gehry from Victoria, B.C., I think, says... not Victoria, East Geelong, Victoria. I'm not sure where that is. He says, I have one that I already posted. I don't work for any particular museum. How should I write about my institution? Oh, it's Victoria, Australia. That's nice. Well, you can pick an institution that you're familiar with and write about that. Otherwise, you can... you're welcome to write in the abstract of what you think would be good mission statements, acquisition and accession policies, and so forth. I will leave that up to you, not knowing your background. And Paul says it's 6 a.m. there, so I want to say you can always watch the recording. I deeply appreciate you getting up at 6 a.m. for this webinar. Yeah, right. Probably 6 a.m. tomorrow. Right. He says, okay, thanks, through blurry eyes. And then a corn wagon thunder in Boone, North Carolina, says, how do collections managers advocate for resources to manage the collection well? That's a good question to end on, maybe. Yeah, and that's a very good question. And I think what you need to do is make your arguments very clear and logical. You need to stress the importance of the collection to all the other functions of the museum and explain why it's important to manage those collections properly. You need to have some good definitions as to what good management is and what that means. You need to be able to justify those expenses and bear in mind we're all basically fighting over the same relatively small pile of money in a museum. And so you want to make sure that your needs are really real. But the main thing is to make sure that the people that you are appealing to for the funding understand the importance of that collection in carrying out the full mission of the museum. And if you can relate it directly to what they do, even the better. But the main thing is to stress the importance of preserving those pieces. In the upcoming webinars, we are going to talk about the agents of deterioration in the museum collections. We're going to talk about simple and some complex steps you can take to better preserve collections. So all of those things can also be good arguments that you can put forward. You'll know far more when the next three weeks are over. And we get into some of the day-to-day details. Right. So I think we're done for today. And I will keep all of you apprised of what's going on with the rebranding and any changes in websites. Through the email that you got the other day, because I have a way to send that email to all of you. And if you have any trouble using the interface, let me know. And I'll be posting the slides and the recording shortly. So you can watch with that there. You can put your mission statements in the discussion. And I think that's about it. I'm so pleased to see people from all over. And I would like to say thank you to everybody for attending. And I'm sorry that it took us a little, had a few rough spots getting started. I appreciate your patience. And it should go much smoother next week. And I am greatly looking forward to reading the assignments that you posted.