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Dear Allison

I cannot tell you what we do with relation to this as this hasn’t been an issue for us and we are still in the early stages of TMS but here are my thoughts, hopefully some of which will be helpful!

I think it depends on how you are going to treat these ‘surrogates’. Are you going to treat them as ‘accessioned’ works, part of the permanent collection? I agree with Laurie, in that you could end up accessioning each time you make a copy which wouldn’t be a good idea. Will you use the same printed surrogate every time you display it or will you create new versions from the digital? If you are going to create new versions each time then they would probably be best treated as a ‘support collection’.

I don’t know how you use departments or classification in TMS but you could have a department that deals with these copies eg Surrogate department or you could have a classification of ‘Surrogates’ (you may already do this!)

If you weren’t intending to assign an accession number to them you could add the surrogates to TMS with the department ‘Surrogates’ (or whatever) and use a different numbering scheme (I think you do use different numbers for them) and then create a parent child relationship in the hierarchy with the digital image as the parent. That way you still have an actual record in TMS for the surrogate.

Or maybe you could treat the surrogate as a component of the accessioned digital image.

The mda’s (Museum Documentation Association based in the UK) has produced a lot of very useful factsheets on documentation. There is one on documenting photographs, some of which you may find useful.

http://www.mda.org.uk/docphoto.htm

(Allison) Does anyone think that instead of accessioning the digital scans, I should accession the first set of prints we make from them? (this doesn't seem right...but...does it really matter?)

Do you use part numbers in your institution? You could consider creating 2 TMS records using the same root number for the digital image and first set of prints but use part numbers to distinguish between the two. That way you would know from the accession numbers that they are related. You could also create the parent child relationship link.

The following is from the mda’s factsheet:

“It is the use of a photograph, rather than the format it is in, that will determine how it should be documented. Any kind of item can be accessioned into a museum's permanent collection providing it comes within the museum's collecting policy. Any type of photograph can be accessioned but sometimes you may need to make a decision about what format to accession: for example, you may acquire a negative and a print of an image at the same time. Opinions vary as to which you should accession, but most museums agree that where possible it should be the most original version of an image available to you. If you want to make copies of photographs, better quality will be achieved by using an original negative rather than copying a print.”

Good luck!

Caroline Delahunty

TMS Officer

National Gallery of Ireland

Merrion Square West

Dublin 2

tel: 00 353 1 632 5525