T-Ann,

 

Having dealt with the problem many times over the years, particularly in a museum that had been in existence for over 60 years when I got there, I developed the protocol of using a trinomial number beginning with the year an item was first known to be in the museum and using a zero as the middle (accession) number. i.e. 2005-0-XXX .  The zero in the middle always indicated an item found in the collection. 

 

I would use the year date the item had first been seen in the museum based on any sound clue I could find (photo of exhibit it was in, scrap of paper with a note that could be dated somehow, in a box with a LeRoyed label from an exhibit (latest date LeRoy lettering was used was about 1979).  If no such clue existed, I used the present year.  Thus a 2001-0-xx number would tell anyone in the future that the item was in the museum by the year 2001.

 

The year number, in the situation I was in, was important because many things in the early years had come in on loan and we would have to search for them when the second or third generation arrived to reclaim them. Often there were multiple items that might be ‘the one’  (three ladderback chairs all without numbers for instance). Having evidence that the item was in the collection in 1969 thus eliminated it if the loan was dated 1974.  (Interestingly, we had the copies of the loan forms –it was just that we had no way to know which item the list referred to except for occasional ones that were pretty distinctive in some attribute.)

 

Lucy Sperlin

Butte County Historical Society

Oroville, CA