I agree –this is an important item to have in a collection policy.  I expect that the actual number doesn’t matter so much as being sure that something (the number or another data field such as ‘provenance’) documents the earliest time it was noted in the collection, and any circumstances you have evidence for. 

 

The usefulness of this was apparent when I worked for a museum with a very old collection and for various reasons some items had no numbers and/or were no longer to be found. Unfortunately many of these were loans, and it was by process of elimination that we had to try to figure out what reasonably could have been an item in question. Sometimes the date of the earliest ‘sighting’ of an item could eliminate it from a search. e.g. an item that was documented in the collection or just on site (whether accessioned at that time or not) could be eliminated as an item that was part of an incoming loan that came at a later date.  The same reasoning has also been applied in a case where things were stolen and we could document their existence in our museum as being prior to the dates the defendant was a volunteer there.

 

Now ‘cleaning up’ yet another collection, I sometimes find something in an envelope with a postmark which provides documentation at least of date and return address.  I always save the envelope as documentation in the file for whatever accession number it is eventually given.  For all of the above reasons, then, I lean towards using an accession number for the year you can document it to (provided you have a definitive list of all accession numbers previously issued for that year so you don’t end up with a duplicate number).

 

Lucy Sperlin

Butte County Historical Society

Oroville, CA

 

 

I'd first recommend checking your collection policy to see if that particular issue is covered.  I have worked with one collection that you would enter the year that it was received if known, but with another collection it was always the year that the object was accessioned.  Other people who have been in the field longer than I may have a more definitive point of view, but if your institution doesn't have a policy already in place for this, then I think it would be up to your discretion.  If it's not in the policy, you might want to consider placing it in there after this so that continuity of policy occurs.

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