We have several historic sites/structures we care for and the photographic documentation of the restoration work is quite important to us. Although we don’t accession or individually catalog these photos, we do treat them as archival and they are considered part of our institutional archives. They are also referenced fairly regularly. For the printed photos and negatives, we store those in archival document boxes in our archives. In recent years all the documentation has been done with digital photography and those we just keep electronic copies of. They are organized by site in folders and stored on our server (which is backed up regularly).

Hi Folks,

I am wondering if any of you have photos of restoration work that has taken place at your museum or historic home and how they are treated.  I just discovered that we have about 1000 from some restoration work that was completed on a historic home in 2004 showing men repairing a roof, leaks in ceilings, exposed underground pipes, etc.  All of these images have been accessioned as part of our photo collection.  It seemed like a complicated issue to me because this places them to a higher standard of care than if they were just documentary style images to be used for reference by staff in the future.  It also means the difference between having them in a cheap binder on a shelf or in a fairly expensive archival box taking up valuable shelf space in a collections storage area.  While the information they contain is useful to us, their historic value can probably be debated.

Any suggestions would be most helpful!

Thanks,

Mike  

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