[Nhcoll-l] hard copy accessions/specimen register

[John E Simmons]

There are several good reasons to keep a bound register for accessions,
including permanence, security, legal standing, and sustainability.



The problem with databases (and all other information stored
electronically) is that it is not permanent or secure. Ultimately, whether
it is maintained on a limited-access hard drive or in cloud storage, all
electronic information storage is based on the use of plastic resins and
magnetized metallic particles, neither of which are permanent, and neither
of which will endure as long as acid-free paper and good ink. The only way
to keep electronic information readable is to re-format the data every few
years, which is extraordinarily expensive over time, and which will result
in data loss with repeated software and hardware changes. Re-formatting of
electronic information is rarely a budget line in museums.



A hand-written, bound ledger of accession information has clear legal
standing because a bound ledger is very difficult to alter without leaving
physical evidence behind; by contrast, electronic files are very easy to
change without a trace. Should an institution ever have a legal issue that
involves proof of acquisition, the bound ledger of accessions will be a far
more supportive document than an electronic file.



It is important to emphasize that at present, there is no way to preserve
electronically stored information for the next 20 or 30 years, much less
several hundred years in the future, but we know that properly cared for
paper documents will last at least 500 years. An example: Walter Isaacson
wrote biographies of both Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci, and
Issacson has pointed
out that 7,200 pages of Leonardo’s notebooks that are extant (about a
quarter of the pages of the original notebooks) is “a higher percentage
after five hundred years than the percentage of Steve Job’s emails and
digital documents from the 1990s that he and I were able to retrieve.”



Add to this that printing electron information on paper using available
desktop printers does not produce a permanent copy. Desktop laser printers
do not produce the same quality copy as do commercial laser printers, and
no laser printing technology equals the permanence of letterpress printing
or hand-writing on acid-free paper with good quality ink.



Museums, particularly natural history museums, should be concerned about
using sustainable practices when possible. In this regard, paper-based
records have essentially a one-time carbon impact (the production of the
paper and ink), while electronic records have an on-going carbon footprint
for as long as they are maintained. Current estimates are that storing just
1 GB of digital information has a carbon cost of about 2.25 kg of CO2 per
year. As museums continue to generate electronic information they need to
consider what this means in terms of contributing to climate change.



Electronic information has many advantages (ease of searching, editing, and
sharing chief among them), but we need to keep in mind that electronic
information is not secure, permanent, or sustainable. Museums should
carefully consider which documents should be paper-based for archival
purposes (for example, accession files, catalogs, and loan documents),
which should be both (such as catalogs and loan documents, for ease of
searching and sharing), and which should be born-digital (responses to
queries, office memos, correspondence that does not require a legal
signature, etc.).



—John


John E. Simmons
Writer and Museum Consultant
Museologica
*and*
Investigador Asociado, Departamento de Ornitologia
Museo de Historia Natural, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima


On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 9:34 AM Willem Coetzer Dr. <
W.Coetzer at saiab.nrf.ac.za> wrote:

> If your museum uses a paper book or register to record either accessions
> (batches of material coming into the organization) or specimens catalogued
> as part of a collection, please let me know via a separate message,
> including the reason why you do this and why it is not sufficient to rely
> on a database.
>
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