This month we were joined by a lovely student called Oliver for a week of work experience.
While we were having a chat about all things museums and collections management we discussed the Spectrum standard.
Spectrum is the UK collections management standard and is made up of a number of primary and secondary procedures which guide collections work. If you want to find out some more about Spectrum, have a read of last October’s ‘A Collections Management What?’ blog.
One of the primary procedures we chatted about is Location & Movement Control. This means keeping a record of where all the objects in your care are and keeping them up to date whenever you move them. Something that is very important when you are responsible for looking after thousands of items!
But you might be wondering how a bear hunt comes into this…
As we were flicking through the pages of the Spectrum book, we came across a picture of a very sweet teddy bear. We wondered how many, if any, teddy bears there might be in AMHT’s collection, so we decided to look into it.
We got one result.
Our teddy bear is wearing a jumper with Aston Martin’s wings embroidered onto it and ‘Review 96’. The jumper was produced especially for teddy’s starring role on the front cover of the AM Review 1996, an Aston Martin Owners Club publication.
The record had quite a broad location, so with Location & Movement control procedures fresh in our minds, we went on a bear hunt to see if we could narrow this down and make some updates.
Starting with the information we had available, we identified two potential older carboard boxes to search. On the first box we looked at there were lots of varied items listed on the lid, and happily we found our teddy bear’s accession number amongst them.
When we opened the box we found teddy a couple of layers down, nestled underneath a layer of tissue paper.
Because of the condition of the older cardboard box and the mixture of items it contained, we decided to repack the contents into acid free boxes and locate all of the items to their new homes, right down to a shiny new box number.
We labelled everything clearly as we went, Oliver learnt how to make tissue puffs to support objects, and we added the new location information for every object we rehomed.
Bear hunt successfully completed, we should never need to go on one again!
