I am on a task force at the National Museum of American History trying to
define what the minimum amount of documentation is needed to make our objects
useful to the telling of our story. What do you in the field consider the
minimum? What is the "practical ideal." Does information storage technology
have an impact on the data collected? How far beyond administrative and
descriptive data should we go in documenting a historic object? What is the
best means of making this collected documentation accessible to the museum's
staff, scholars and the public? What forms might this documentation take?
Photographs? digital images? Letters? Journal articles? Catalog worksheets?
Computer files?
 
Any answers?
 
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