Hello brain trust-

I am the only staff member (part-time) at a very small volunteer-run museum. As with many small museums, we are a mix of archives, objects, books, and who knows what else? For the past 100 years or so, we have served as a kind of "attic" for the community. I just got a new collections management policy approved and am working to gain intellectual control over our large collection. Of course, as I'm doing this, new potential donations are arriving weekly, and I am trying to keep up with those while back-processing our current collection at the same time. An age-old tale, to be sure.

Many of the donations we receive have mixed object, manuscript, and archival materials, and I would like advice on how best to process these donations so that the system is both in line with best practices but also accessible to and replicable by future volunteers and community members, most of whom have no museum training. We use PastPerfect for our library, archives, manuscripts, and object collections. Researchers and community members generally come in looking for information by subject or geographic location rather than by person, but donations are often made as a large group of objects and archival material mixed together but meticulously collected and arranged by a resident who has been planning this donation for a number of years. (A museum is known around here as the place to deposit all one's old stuff when one, well, passes on.)

To help give you an idea of this, say John Night donates his collection of parade fliers and memorabilia, mummer's costumes, and committee agendas/notes from the Jonestown Mummer's Group. He has collected these as a group, but obviously the fliers and costumes cannot be stored together. If a community member who knows John wants to come and look at his collection, my volunteers shouldn't have to go on a wild goose chase to to figure out which parts of the collection are in the archives, which parts are in clothing boxes, etc.

Therefore, should these items share a collection name and accession number and have object and/or series numbers according to their material? Does it make more sense to completely split these donations into two or more collections based on their material? I can create related records in PastPerfect, but is splitting up the donation into multiple collections and only relating them by PastPerfect interfering with original order and respect des fonds?

I realize that this last component is more of an archival concern, but since the donations generally include both object and archival material, I feel that it is a relevant issue. My volunteers are fantastic people and very enthusiastic, and they shouldn't need years of study to continue to process the collection on a basic level. Ultimately, the system I develop here must be relatively simple, as I do not want future volunteers to need a museum studies degree in order to navigate and perpetuate the system if a museum professional in unavailable.

I hope that I have explained this adequately and that there is a simple solution. If we were a larger institution (or one more comfortable with enforcing a collections policy) it might be easier to accommodate these mixed collections. As it is, our main focus is on accessibility.

Any advice you have on the matter is greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Kelsey

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