Collecting practices I think that Lucy did a wonderful job of laying out the challenges and difficulties of contemporary collecting.  The original post raised many questions, and I just want to bite off one bit, on proactive collecting.

In the institutions in which I have worked, I have watched both reactive (accepting donations) and proactive (seeking artifacts) collecting.  First of all, we must do both, always.  It really is true that we have no clue what people have at home in their closets—the mind boggles, truly.

By the same token, I believe that it is the museum curator’s job to survey the landscape, and as Lucy suggests, identify contemporary material that needs collecting.

How do we do this?

The first thing to do is to have a thorough understanding of mission, and then to translate the ways in which mission will play out in the realm in which we are collecting.  At my current institution, a museum of Boy Scouting and Girl Scouting, the pool of artifacts from which I could potentially draw is not as unlimited as it was when I worked in  general history museums.  

Then, you need to get to know your community—however big or small it might be.  Who is doing what to whom?  Who are the new immigrant groups?  What industries are rising or falling?  What are the characteristics of life as it is being lived by ordinary people?  What is important to people now?  Can you guess what is likely to be important to people in the future?  What are the chances (as Lucy suggests) that you will be able to get certain artifacts in years to come?  [You get to develop your own set of questions.]  For example, I never felt any particular urgency about collecting most political buttons as the elections happened.  I know from personal experience that these types of artifacts are worn for a short period of time, generally, then put away in a drawer until they get thrown out or donated to a museum.  Made in multiples, these artifacts are usually easy to get years later.  Other types of ephemera may be more difficult to happen by in later years—handbills for raves, for instance.

All of this begins to form a core of a collecting plan—another portion of which is an assessment of your current collection.  You need to collect to fill gaps, if no one else is collecting quite the same things as you are.  I never felt terribly compelled to collect computers, for another example.  These are highly specialized artifacts, there are institutions devoted to collecting them, and interpreting them requires that they be operational (in my personal opinion).  A monitor sitting in a display case might be a great design artifact, but it has very little meaning otherwise.

In the end, your collection will be stronger, and much more useful to both your institution and scholars, if you collect proactively. But in order for proactive collecting to work, you have to really understand what you are doing, and then work hard to find the people and get to know them so that they will donate their important stuff to you.  (I read the newspaper pretty carefully.)  And you’ll have to make hard decisions, so that you don’t end up with every Happy Meal toy ever produced.

In the end, however, there is no real scientific way to get this collecting work done.  It will always be a curator’s judgment, and the collections will reflect the curator’s interests and biases.  That’s just how they are.

But, boy, is it fun!

Claudia


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Claudia J. Nicholson
Executive Director
North Star Museum of Boy Scouting and Girl Scouting
651-748-2880
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www.nssm.org

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