My “Caring for your Collection” class inspired me to research museum policies and techniques. I found a PDF produced in 2004 by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) entitled “Running a Museum: A Practical Handbook”, and just finished reading it last night.
While some of it was dry and much of it was irrelevant to me, I did learn a lot from it. Of particular interest to me was the chapter on “Inventories and Documentation”, where five different standards on what fields should be cataloged are compared and summarized into a set of core fields. This reminded me of the process I went through trying to decide what data elements I wanted to present in the Harvey Mercheum exhibits.
I also had several ideas on how to improve future displays of the Harvey Mercheum permanent collection, like the one still going on at the main branch of the Schenectady County Public Library (SCPL). Hopefully opportunities will arise for using these ideas.
