Museums are busy places, and you may have more tasks to complete than hours in the day. It’s easy to feel cut off from other departments in your museum, and silo mentality can hurt both your department and projects. When your tasks require cross-department collaboration, you can find your busy schedule makes it impossible to [...]
Your department is extremely busy. Your team has a wide variety of tasks to complete, and sometimes it seems like many of them aren’t even related to your collection. By the time you’re done with your regular administrative tasks, half the day has gone by and it feels like you haven’t gotten anything done. Exhibition [...]
Joint ownership of the Mapplethorpe collection: Best practices in learning how to share In 2011, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) jointly acquired a collection of over 2,000 works by Robert Mapplethorpe from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation (RMF). This historic acquisition is unique in many ways: not [...]
Cataloguing a Museum without Walls Chapman University Art Collections is a unique group of collections that functions through the lens of education and consists of the Phyllis & Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art, the Chapman Campus Collection, and the new Hilbert Museum of California Art. Objects from the collections are displayed beyond the gallery, [...]
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) collection of Time-Based Media Arts (TBMA) increases every year in number and complexity. Objects range from 16mm films and vintage electronic installations to digital videos, software-based artworks and video games. Customization and utilization of TMS, SAAM's collections management system, enables collections managers to account for the volume and variety [...]
Preserving, Cataloguing, and Sharing Rare Books with Collections Management Software The Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, was the vision of collectors H.J. Lutcher Stark and Nelda C. Stark. Opened in 1978, the Stark collection is focused on “the stunning land, dramatic people, and diverse wildlife of the American West.” Allison Evans, the Stark’s [...]
Registrar and Collections Manager at Leeds Museums and Galleries A day in the Registrars Department at Leeds Museums and Galleries, the largest local authority-run museum service in England, is never dull for Jen Kaines. As Registrar and Collections Manager, Jen handles 1.3 million objects from the natural world and industrial history, to fine and decorative [...]
Assistant Registrar, Image Management, at the Worcester Art Museum The world-renowned Worcester Art Museum, in Worcester, Massachusetts, is home to an encyclopedic collection spanning 5,000 years of art and culture and 38,000 objects including, but not limited to: paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photography, prints, drawings and contemporary art. Assistant Registrar Sarah Gillis and her colleagues [...]
As galleries, libraries, archives and museums bring their physical objects into the digital realm, new methods of organization need to be designed to support the accessibility and sustainability of the digital media. Sarah Gillis, Assistant Registrar for Image Management at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, specializes in cataloguing photographic archives. At our TMS [...]
Registrar for Collections Management at the Getty Carole Campbell is the Registrar for Collections Management at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. Carole and her staff work extensively within TMS to manage the Museum’s acquisitions, loans and exhibitions. The Getty is said to be one of the most [...]
