Leonard has also touched a subject that greatly effects
me.
I have (am) worked on large museum documentation projects at
the coal face so to speak.
First at Snibston Discovery pArk for
Leicestershire Museums and presently for the
Discovery Centre nee The Museum
of Science & Industry at Birmingham.
Both projects that I have been working on
were effectively
retrospective documentation exercises in industrial and
working life
collections. (totaling 10,000 & 30,000 objects respectively)
In my experience the deciding factor of estimating the number
of objects processed in a set
time is determined by a large variety of
factors.
The usual factors include:
if they are inputted onto
computer (yes in both my cases) how many fields are being checked,
are photos
being used (selectively), state of existing records (how will they be
checked/assessed) etc
In both cases around 50 to 70% of the collections did
have some form of previous info.
However there are other factors to consider.
Access to the
collection. Are the objects difficult to get to (I have quite a lot
of
experience struggling to get into old showcases).
Perhaps the store is not a suitable place to work in so the
objects have a to be moved to holding
area for checking.
Another key factor is determining how dedicated the staff are
to the project? Will they
really be exclusively working on 1 project (I
have found it is all too easy to get pulled
into other tasks) and if that
person is set to 1 dedicated task
would they not become a little jaded over
a prolonged period.
I have found working in teams of 2 or more helps to break
up the monotony.
Thus setting a target of 20 objects a day per person sounds
reasonable (checking,
marking, inputting, maybe basic research were
necessary) but 2400 in 6 months (20x5(days)x
4(weeks)x6(months) in reality is
a very steep target (for the same person at least).
In both cases 10 per day per person is much more realistic if
you want to record
more than a basic audit of a collection.
Stephen Lowy
Discovery
Centre
