The Inventory procedure supports you when checking that you have the basic information to be accountable for the objects in your care. If your museum has always met the minimum requirements for the other primary procedures, you will already have this information recorded and you should just keep up the good work. Keeping on top of the other primary procedures will maintain your inventory information. If, however, you do not have the basic information recorded, the procedure will help you tackle the backlog.
Here you can find further resources to help with the Spectrum procedure Inventory and see how other museums have put it into practice. For the procedure itself follow this link. You can find further blog posts related to banishing backlogs here.
This toolkit, from Museum Development Yorkshire, provides a framework to undertake an initial survey of a museum collection to create a collection biography and provide an overview of the collection.
Pulling together who knew what about the collections via a survey helped Dorset Museum banish the backlog, as Collections Assistants Kat Broomfield and Camilla King explain.
Collections Trust Outreach Officer, Sarah Brown, has some sensible and down-to-earth advice for getting to grips with your backlog.
This resource outlines bulk accessioning and how to apply it to different collections.
The procedural manual is a widely recognised device for expressing and communicating a museum’s policy and practice. It should include reference to the standards the museum uses for collecting information about museum objects. The resource describes how to develop and maintain a procedural manual, and what it might contain.
The aim of the Collections Trust Documentation planning pack is to assist museums to produce their own documentation plans. The guidelines contained in the pack can be used for all types of documentation planning; they are not intended as the only way to produce a documentation plan and are specifically to help the documentation planning process as required by UK Museum Accreditation Scheme.
The British Schools Museum have created a documentation procedural manual, which sets a useful example for appropriate contents and structure when creating your own procedural manual for Accreditation.
Jo Moore, Curator and Collections Coordinator at Wheal Martyn, has written this guest blog about how Wheal Martyn approached dealing with their documentation backlog, which was identified following an audit of their collections.
This resource gives guidance on numbering your collection, on different types and formats and a summary of commonly occurring issues surrounding numbering.