A successor to Museum Registration Methods after the revision of its third volume was abandoned as impractical. Reports the most recent research and practice for improving the care, safety, and documentation of museum collections. Covers documentation, collections management, processes, administrative functions, risk management, and ethical and legal issues. Includes a glossary without pronunciation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Rewritten, expanded and fully updated, MRM5 encompasses all that needs to be known and done when a museum accessions, measures, marks, moves, and displays or stores an object/artifact of any kind. MRM5 includes expert advice from more than 60 acknowledged leaders in their disciplines. New with the 5th edition are special teaching sections that challenge students and seasoned staff alike with questions about the process and procedures of accessioning and caring for objects.
Daniel B Reibel's Registration Methods for the Small Museum has been the definitive guide to registration methodology since 1978. Covering all aspects of the registration of museum collections, Registration Methods for the Small Museum provides practical solutions for any museum professional in a concise, readable manner. The new fourth edition brings the classic handbook up-to-date with the electronic registration techniques that are available for today's museum.
Since first publication in 1998, Towards a New Museum has achieved iconic status as a seminal exploration of the late-20th-century revolution in museum architecture: the transformation from museum as restrained container for art to museum as exuberant companion to art. Author Victoria Newhouse critiqued numerous institutions for the display of art opened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, culminating in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao and Richard Meier's Getty Center in Los Angeles. In this expanded edition, she continues her investigation of new museums, assessing the radical, 21st-century changes that have propelled Herzog & de Meuron's De Young Museum in San Francisco and SANAA's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, to the forefront of this building type. Among the institutions added to this new edition are the Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Pinacoteca, perched atop an enormous Fiat factory in Turin, Italy, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, both by Renzo Piano Building Workshop; three notable updates of the museum as sacred space, two by Yoshio Taniguchi and one by SANAA; the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati by Zaha Hadid; and expansions of the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Herzog & de Meuron, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Taniguchi. Finally, the De Young Museum, reflecting its own eclectic conditions, and the 21st Century Museum, consisting of non-hierarchical spaces for every conceivable kind of contemporary artwork as well as facilities for social exchange, are innovative hybrids that propose new directions for the future of museum architecture.
This book is a practical guide for everyone who is confronted with a collection that hasn’t seen any preventive conservation or cataloging before. It helps gaining an overview, defining priorities, and organizing the work in a way it is safe for the objects and the people involved. It defines “logical exits”, goals to work towards where the collection is in a state the next steps can wait without risking the progress made. Later on, readers learn to define their own “logical exits” that fit their specific situation. Compared to other books about collections management it doesn’t focus on the details of collections care, but rather on the big picture of managing such a project. It assumes that at the beginning there is nothing but the reader and an unmanaged collection, so that part of the project is to source money, material, and people to help. The second edition has a new chapter on setting up collections management systems, the original text was reworked and in parts enhanced, there are additional success stories in the last chapter with references to them in the text, and the bibliography now contains some resources for natural history, indigenous, and archaeological collections.
Hailed when it was first published in 1985 as the bible of U.S. collections management, A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections offers the only comprehensive discussion of the legal questions faced by museums regarding collections. This revised and expanded third edition addresses the many legal developments—including a comprehensive discussion of stolen art and the international movement of cultural property, recent developments in copyright, and the effects of burgeoning electronic uses—that have occurred during the past twenty-five years. An authorative, go-to book for any museum professional, Legal Primer offers detailed explanations of the law, suggestions for preventing legal problems, and numerous case studies of lawsuits involving museum collections.
This revised edition of Things Great and Small is a comprehensive resource for preparing and applying collections management policies. Simmons reviews current ideas and literature on the subject, highlights the issues that collections management policies should address, and explains the pros and cons of choosing some policy options over others.
Collection Conundrums: Solving Museum Registration Mysteries provides guidelines for investigating the oddities found in every museum collection - objects without record, identification or sometimes even a location - and determining what to do. Written by registrars Rebecca Buck and Jean A. Gilmore, editors of the best-selling The New Museum Registration Methods, this new volume contains essential information for museums large and small, new and old. The text offers solutions to the problems of old loans, undocumented objects found in collections, items lost in inventory, supplementary collections and more, as well as guidelines on how to keep problems from occurring in the first place. Features a history of registration methods and the standards for collection documentation and care, along with sample documents such as loan agreements, co-tenancy agreements, storage agreements and deed of gift. Recommended for everyone involved in collections planning and management.
In recent years, many museums have implemented sweeping changes in how they engage audiences. However, changes to the field’s approaches to collections stewardship have come much more slowly. Active Collections critically examines existing approaches to museum collections and explores practical, yet radical, ways that museums can better manage their collections to actively advance their missions. Approaching the question of modern museum collection stewardship from a position of "tough love," the authors argue that the museum field risks being constrained by rigid ways of thinking about objects. Examining the field’s relationship to objects, artifacts, and specimens, the volume explores the question of stewardship through the dissection of a broad range of issues, including questions of "quality over quantity," emotional attachment, dispassionate cataloging, and cognitive biases in curatorship. The essays look to insights from fields as diverse as forest management, library science, and the psychology of compulsive hoarding, to inform and innovate collection practices. Essay contributions come from both experienced museum professionals and scholars from disciplines as diverse as psychology, education, and history. The result is a critical exploration that makes the book essential reading for museum professionals, as well as those in training.
"The current "digital revolution" or "digital era" has affected most of the realms of today's world, particularly the domains of communication and the creation, safeguarding and transmission of knowledge. Museums, whose mission is to be open to the public and to acquire, conserve, re-search, communicate and exhibit the heritage of humanity, are thus directly concerned by this revolution. This collection highlights the manner in which museums and curators tackle the challenges of digi-tal technology. The contributions are divided into four groups that illustrate the extent of the impact of digital technologies on museums: namely, exhibitions devoted to new media or mounted with the use of new media; the hidden face of the museum and the conservation of digital works of art; cultural mediation and the communication and promotion of museums using digital tools; and the legal aspects of the digitalisation of content, whether for creative purposes or preservation."
