From "Thing" to "Artefact"

Have you or a relative ever donated an item to a museum, and wondered what the museum did with it? Or, ever just wondered what the difference is between something in a museum and something in an antique shop? Ever notice a little number painted or glued onto an artefact in an exhibit? Today, I hope to give you some answers about those.

First, we in the museum always want to speak directly to the donors. This is sometimes at odds with the donors, who’d rather just drop the item(s) off and be on their way. We want to speak with them in order to get a full history of the items, as well as to get legal title to the items signed over to the museum (so 40 years down the road, a relative can’t come in and say, “Hey, that was my grandmothers—give it to me!”). Once we have the signed Gift Agreement, the objects usually go into a quarantine room. Here, we check them over, give them a light vacuuming if they need it, and make sure there aren’t any bugs in them that might infest the rest of our collections.

After quarantine, the pieces are “accessioned”—formally brought into the museum collection. This is when the objects get their own identification numbers, something like 2011.2.1, where “2011” is the year the item came in, “2” means the second collection brought in that year, and “1” is the individual item within that collection. The number is painted on the object using permanent ink over top an archivally-stable strip of plastic—the number can be taken off again with a few swipes of acetone, if necessary. From this point on, that number (the “Accession Number”) becomes the item’s identity—all documentation regarding source, history, inventory, etc. is tied to the object through that number. Once an object has an Accession Number, we consider it an “artefact.”

The numbers are usually applied to part of the artefact that won’t show when it’s on exhibit. When I visit museums, I try to spot the numbers on artefacts in the display—try it yourself next time you’re in a museum!

The artefact is then described (“catalogued”) in our artefact database—we have about 60 data fields to record information in (dimensions, materials, colours, maker, age, etc.). We snap a photo of it, and link that in to its database record. All the source information is recorded in another database and linked to the artefact’s record in the artefact database. The artefact is then placed in storage, and its location is added to its artefact record. Both the source information and the artefact catalogue information gets printed out, and stored in paper folders—this is intentional redundancy, in case our computer systems get fried.

The artefacts and their information are then accessible to anyone looking to research that type of artefact, or building an exhibit, etc. The whole process takes about an hour per artefact—one of the reasons why we don’t take everything that might be offered to us. With almost 25,000 artefacts in the Esplanade Museum’s collection, just registering items into the collection has taken about 13 years of effort!