>In a message dated 3/19/97 9:40:05 PM, it was written
>
>This question is directed to those registration departments or collections
>management offices who are asked to make their accession files available to
>researchers.  To what extent do you allow full access?  What kind of records
>do you redact from the files before handing them over to scholars, visiting
>curators, students, docents, and the general public?  Do you permit
>photocopying of the records? Do you get flak if you attempt to restrict file
>access to museum staff only?

In my experience as a collections management consultant to fine-arts
museums, accession files have always been considered the secure protected
property of the museum, and not a public resource available to researchers
and scholars.  While they often do contain much information that should be
made available to the public, just as often they contain privileged
information regarding provenance and acquisition that is private.  In
addition, accession files often contain the unpublished opinions of
curators, conjectures concerning attribution and other materials that may
be considered the exclusive intellectual property of curators, visiting
scholars and/or the museum. Not all curators are equal, and the insertions
of some may not be held in the same high regard as the contributions of
others.  While it is important to keep everything added to the file, there
is no obligation to offer every opinion to the public.  Conservation
information in particular is easy for non-technical readers to misinterpret.

Steve Keller writes of security concerns; his warnings are especially
relevant for museums that do not keep their accession records in accession
order.  Many museums sort their records by a predetermined classification
scheme, so that it is impossible to discover when a card has been removed.
Further, in one museum for which I worked, at least one curator was taking
the liberty of changing the attribution of items without going through the
appropriate approval process.  In another, the photo rights and
reproduction assistant would xerox the accession cards and send them out
with each photo and each request for bibliographic information.

In many ways museums are documenting institutions, their property is
composed of objects AND information.  We all agree that the objects must be
cared for and protected, but the information is often just as valuable, yet
is not given the respect and protection it is due.

A computerized accession system can help solve some of these issues.
Protected information can be separated from the public component. Deletion
and alteration of records can be controlled, and private and conjectural
contributions can be assigned to individual accounts.  In addition, the
very process of creating a digital resource out of an analogue one can be
used to discover missing objects and missing documentation.


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Robert A. Baron, Museum Computer Consultant
P.O. Box 93, Larchmont, N.Y. 10538
mailto:[log in to unmask]
Editor, "Copyright and Fair Use: The Great Image Debate,"
VISUAL RESOURCES, Vol. XII, Nos. 3-4.
See: http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/vrcfu.htm
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