One of my favourite things about working with collections is getting to play detective.
There’s more investigative work involved than you might think, we even have a magnifying glass – though sadly no deer stalker.
There are different situations in which we might need to use our detective skills;
- if we’re trying to identify a mysterious item already in the collection, which might have become detached from its label or records
- if we’re identifying a donation offer to put to our Acquisition & Disposal Committee, to make sure we don’t already hold an example in the collection
- when we’re working on our inventory to make sure we have an up to date list of everything we have
This last one is where our detective skills were called upon this month. Inventory is one of the Spectrum primary procedures and is all about making sure we have the basic information to be accountable for the objects in our care, and able to tackle the backlog if we don’t.
Many museums are faced with a backlog of items which have accrued over many years and for which the resources haven’t always been there to tackle them. Some items might not be listed anywhere, unlike those which are already catalogued and on the database, so it’s these ‘invisible’ items that we need to make sure we capture as well. Inventorying is a great way to help ‘banish the backlog’ and is a quicker process than the more detailed cataloguing, which is much more open-ended.
We’re working through our own backlog at AMHT, inventorying unidentified items which have never been accessioned into the collection. Once we have identified and listed what there is, we can then cross-check these items against our database.
The box we tackled recently contained a huge quantity of varied trim samples, mostly leather, which are off-cuts from the manufacturing process at Aston Martin. We were in need of a little extra help on this one, given the range of Aston Martin leather options and names, and were lucky to be joined by Guy Jenner, CEO of HWM.
With Guy’s extensive experience and knowledge of Aston Martin’s, he was able to help us identify the colour and name of every single sample, as well as tell us which model range it would have been used in. He also brought with him some named reference samples which definitely eased the process!
We inventoried the contents of the box, allocating temporary numbers to each sample so they are easily searchable, and recorded any information on them (hello handy magnifying glass) to make sure we have captured everything we need to meet the Inventory procedure.
Excitingly, we came across some samples which we’ve not seen before and which we don’t currently have in the collection. Hopefully the next box we turn our magnifying glass to will be just as good!
