[Nhcoll-l] [EXTERNAL] Re: hard copy accessions/specimen register

[Bacharach, Joan]

Greetings Willem;

John Simmons has provided an excellent rationale for retaining a paper copy of the accession book.  While no one could have done it any better, I’d also like to add the U.S. National Park Service [NPS] accession book practice.

The NPS museum program has 385 parks with museum collections that are located throughout the USA.  These include national parks such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, Everglades, Mesa Verde, to national historical parks such as Chaco Culture and Hopewell Culture, to presidential and historic homes, battlefields, and many others.  Collections range from archeology, archives, art, and history, to paleontology, geology, botany, and more.

NPS museums follow collections management policies and procedures published in the NPS Museum Handbook at National Park Service - Museum Management Program (nps.gov)<https://www.nps.gov/museum/index.html>.  The Museum Handbook, Part II, Museum Records covers documentation, including guidance on the required hard copy accession book in Section U.,1. What is the accession book? stating:

“ The Accession Book, Form 10-256 (Figure 2.16) documents the source for every object in the park’s museum collection. It contains the sequential log of transactions that prove NPS ownership of museum collections... All material in the park’s museum collection must be part of an accession in the accession book. You haven’t officially accessioned the material until you enter the accession in the accession book. Treat your accession book as a legal document. It may be used in a court of law, if necessary. The value of the book as a legal document lies in the uninterrupted sequence of entries, without missing pages or erasures. The accession book is one of your most important museum record-keeping documents. It is designed for permanence. The pages are made of high quality rag paper. Each page is string-bound into a hard cover…”  The accession book is kept in a locking, fire resistive cabinet when not in use.

Once the accession transaction is entered into the paper/hardcopy accession book, staff at parks and collections centers then proceed to enter accession, catalog and other data into the Interior Collections Management System [ICMS] automated collections database.

Best wishes en groete!
Joan

Joan Bacharach
Senior Curator
Museum Management Program
National Park Service

Museum Management Program Website<https://www.nps.gov/museum/>  |  www.nps.gov/museum<http://www.nps.gov/museum>
The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks<https://artsandculture.google.com/project/national-park-service>

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of John E Simmons
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2024 1:20 PM
To: Willem Coetzer Dr. <W.Coetzer at saiab.nrf.ac.za>
Cc: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Nhcoll-l] hard copy accessions/specimen register




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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<mailto: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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