In response to Kara J. Hurst:

Yes, I would say that item-listing all the components of an acquisition for
the accession or registration procedure is in fact the first stage of
cataloguing.  I have somewhat mixed feelings about our "bi-level"
accessioning procedure in practice, to be sure, but actually think that it is
theoretically sound.  I disagree that all accessions and their components are
equal and should be treated equally.  I think our system recognizes that
fact, but it needs to be used judiciously.  If I had my way, I would preserve
the basic method, but make it a little more flexible.  As it stands, an
"accession" requires item-level listing just to get it registered.  This
poses a problem with a large and unwieldy accession composed of objects of
high value; it may be relegated to the "non-acession" procedure simply
because of the time required for item-level listing.

The "accession" procedure, however, did not always require itemized lists.
In my unit we have a huge collection of "business ephemera" (an estimated two
million pieces); at the time it was accessioned, item listing was not
required, and of course this would have been virtually impossible.  Some of
the items are of very high value, but most considerably less so.  If this
collection were just received today, we would have to use the "non-accession"
method, for better or for worse.  Although it's one of our largest
collections, it's somewhat atypical.  Most of our unit's collections are
"archival" in the sense of being organically related business and personal
archives of manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, audio tapes, etc.  I
would argue that most of these collections really should be used, handled,
and catalogued at the group rather than item level, and that it would be
unwise both in theory and practice to ever attempt to catalogue them at the
item level--even if that were humanly possible--which it isn't!

I'm in charge of photographs in our collections, which often don't fit the
archival mold, however, since visual materials clearly are often selected and
used by researchers at the item level.  Since I was formerly a curator of the
museum's historic photographs collection, where item-level cataloguing was
the norm, and the number of objects I dealt with were in the thousands rather
than the millions, I'm now accustomed to working with materials at both ends
of the spectrum--the item-level museum standard and the group-level archival
standard.  I think I make informed distinctions based on this experience.
And since it happens that I'm also the coordinator of our automated
cataloguing, I'm in a position to control this aspect to fit the materials
and their needs.  Our standard is both accessioning (or "non-accessioning,"
to use our museum's apparently distinctive terminology) and cataloguing at
the group level.  However, I also sponsor a lot of item-level cataloguing of
visual materials, which is generally usage-driven.  Basically, researchers
use our collections at the group level, but whenever someone selects an
individual item (usually a photograph or other visual document) for
reproduction or exhibition, we try to follow up that usage with an item
catalog record--often quite detailed.  I think of our methods as letting
researchers "prospect" for visual materials, which they locate with our
box-level and folder-level descriptions on container lists, then we protect
their investment of time (and our own sanity) by item-level cataloguing,
including adequate name, title, and subject descriptors, and the folder
location of the object within the collection--plus any negative numbers or
other information generated during the transaction.  Thus our group-level
descriptions on the container lists are accompanied by a gradually
increasing, cumulative automated item-level catalog, compiled on this
usage-driven, ad hoc basis.

I don't really know how standard or idiosyncratic our methods are--certainly
they're not standard museum practice--but a lot of my photographic colleagues
seem to think we're on the right track, taking a reasonable approach to the
challenge of dealing with millions of objects!

To return to the accession/nonaccession procedure per se:  As I think I said
before, I usually use the accession, item list method for very small groups
of photographs, which can be listed conveniently on a one- to three-page
accession memorandum.  I do this not only because it's convenient and
feasible, but because photographs in small groups tend to be of higher value,
usually of aesthetic significance as well as "documentary" subject value.  My
problem is large collections, too numerous to list at the item level, but
which may still contain many pieces of high value, and which of necessity
have to be relegated to the non-accession method, with its implicit
assumption that they require a somewhat lower level of accountability.
Incidentally, another reality of large "non-accessioned" collections is that,
just as no one has time to list or catalog every piece, neither does anyone
have time to even number or identify each piece.  Therefore we have to impose
relatively high levels of security when our collections are handled by
researchers, since unnumbered objects are more vulnerable.  This is true of
most archival practice, of course--researchers get only one box at a time and
are allowed to handle only one folder at a time, and we watch them like hawks
to make sure things don't get mixed up or go astray.  Objects sent out for
photographing get tracked carefully with numbered, descriptive tags--and
these tags later help facilitate the selective item-level cataloguing I
described above.

When a collection gets dual registration numbers from both the accession and
non-accession series, both numbers are cross-referenced in the registrar's
files and database.  This is usually very straightforward and seldom produces
any confusion.  With one collection of photographs and related papers which I
mentioned in my previous message, both numbers were assigned at the same
time.  The other large acquisition, which at the moment has only a single
non-accession number, will probably get an accession number for selected
portions--forming a key set of higher-value, exhibition-quality images, and
may not be assigned until the archival-tradition processing is complete,
probably a year or two down the road.  This new accession number will come
from the new year's numerical series, whenever it occurs.  There won't be any
interpolating or other recourse to this year's accession series.
Cross-referencing by the registrar will be no problem, despite the fact that
the transactions will have occurred in separate years.  A simple memo in both
files will explain what happened.  It's less confusing than it sounds.

I hope that answers your questions.  These procedures are a bit different
from those of many museums, but they're easy enough to implement, and they
work for us.  Although my unit probably uses the non-accession option much
more frequently than the rest of the museum, and it relates well to archival
traditions, I personally think that other components of our museum could
profitably adopt our practices.  This is especially true in history museums,
I should think, where large groups of often small items pose registrarial and
cataloguing challenges, resulting in time-consuming projects which may be
disproportionate to the significance of the individual items.  This was
driven home to me a number of times when I worked with the photographic
history collections of photographs and objects, and especially during the
massive Smithsonian inventory project of many years ago.  I think many people
at that time were faced with the reality of severe backlogs of unaccessioned,
uncatalogued items--backlogs created by the assumption that you had to deal
with everything at the item level.  (Now that I think of it, our museum's
"non-accession" registration procedure was probably influenced by the whole
inventory experience, in which the extent of processing backlogs revealed the
folly of assuming that all museum objects are equal and require equal
treatment).  I was already leaning in the direction of group-level treatment
of some objects anyway.  I well remember encountering a bag of tiny
"Stanhope" lenses (used in optical toys and trinkets) during the inventory.
I had already had the wisdom, I felt, of cataloguing these things as a group:
my single catalog entry just described a lot of "several hundred" nearly
identical lenses.  When the registrarial inventory technician insisted that
we had to make a separate entry in the database for each lens, I rebelled,
refused to do it.  I reasoned that the significance of the things was in the
grouping itself, which pointed up their small size and uniformity, so we
ended up making a single entry and estimating the number at about a
thousand--just counted a small group, measured, and multiplied.  That's an
extreme example, but I've seen many other groups of related objects in the
museum whose significance, like archival papers, lies in the
interrelationship of the group components rather than in the individual
pieces.  What you're doing is operating in a hierarchical
fashion--containerize the group of related objects and describe it as a set
of related parts.  You can always go back and subdivide it and describe the
objects individually if you find you need to, but at least you've gained a
level of intellectual control, which is better and safer than having a
perpetual backlog of unprocessed individual items which you laboriously
catalog piece by piece.

David Haberstich

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