Although we don’t have to deal with a large curatorial staff, our collection is such that many things do cross into several different categories.  We have kept things very broad in our Departments, and actually also pretty broad in some of our Classifications.  We depend on our own thesaurus hierarchy (using AAT terms, but not the exact AAT hierarchy) that we built into the Attributes field to break things down further, and it also really helps with things that would cross over into several different classifications or departments.

Some of our Departments include: Visual Collections, Home Life, Technology, Commercial Life, Native American.  The Department Classifications break down just a bit farther, i.e. Visual Collections has Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphics (Graphics encompasses Photographs, Prints, Drawings all under the one heading broken down further in the thesaurus hierarchy). 

Our tavern signs for example are in the Visual Collections Department, and they are Classified as Paintings.  But they really also could be considered part of Commerical Life, as they are from a business, so in the Attribute thesaurus there is a hierarchy breakdown for Tavern Signs/Signs/Commercial Objects along with the main classification of Tavern Signs/Sign Paintings/Paintings.  (Everyone confused yet?  I’ll put a screen shot at the bottom.)

This makes it easy for us to search this field for just our Tavern Signs, but those will also get pulled into a search for any general commercial signs in the collection.

If you had photographs in both your American and European departments, they could still have some sort of classification in a thesaurus that would call them specifically photographs – and searching for photographs in this section should pull together all photographs in all collections – and then the department would be obvious from the main object record.

Now I’m just curious – how many others have created their own classification hierarchy?  And does it help when crossing over the different Departments? 

Hope this give you some ideas,

Diane

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Diane Lee, Collections Manager Ÿ 860-236-5621 x242

Connecticut Historical Society

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From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Suzanne Stephens
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 12:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Crossing Department lines

We have similar issues here, and it has been a topic of discussion at meetings with curators and registrars. Our curatorial focus tends to shift when staffing changes. For example, when we originally got collection software (20 years ago), we had one curator for all Western painting and sculpture. Now we have three curators for what used to be one department. We also have discreet collections that have been moved around to different curatorial departments. For example, 20th century art glass, like Chilhuly, was originally brought in under our decorative arts department. Much later they moved it to painting and sculpture. This required basically hand-picking which works needed to be moved to another department in TMS.

Some of the curators want me to create new departments in TMS to reflect recent staffing changes. However, I prefer to keep the departments more broad to allow for future curatorial division decisions. I encourage and assist curators with using fields such as constituent, classification, and date ranges to help them find the objects that meet their criteria for a given situation. There does not seem to be a solution that makes everyone happy. However, I am an advocate of keeping the departments fairly broad in TMS.

Suzanne Stephens

Database Administrator

Birmingham Museum of Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Aylsworth, David [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 10:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Crossing Department lines

I imagine that there are a other museums that are in our situation and I'd be curious how many of you feel it is a problem, or how you deal with it.

Our museum has a lot of curatorial departments that have a lot of crossover between them.  Some of them are time based (Antiquities, Modern & Contemporary), others are culture based (Latin American, American, European, Asian), others are media based (Prints & Drawings, Photography, Film & Video), and we've now added one that is religion based (Islamic).

Objects in the Islamic department are also Asian or Antiquities.  Our Asian department collects not only traditional woodblock prints and the like, but also contemporary photographs, videos, and sculptures-sometimes by the same artists collected by the Photography and Modern & Contemporary department.  Our Latin American department collects prints, drawings, contemporary paintings, and videos.  This list could go on and on.

I don't want to discourage the cross-department collecting, but while the curators are only really concerned about their most recent acquisitions, I'm concerned that twenty years from now, it's going to be strange why the same artist has works that look identical in different departments.  Am I being too uptight about this?  Does anyone have any similar situation or thoughts?

I'd appreciate hearing any comments any of you have.

Thanks,

David

David Aylsworth

Collections Registar

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

tel:  713-639-7824

fax: 713-639-7780