In this week’s blog, our Art Collection Documentation Assistant Gaby Cortes discusses some of the challenges involved in auditing the Art Collection and how the addition of barcode labels is helping to tackle this.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been working on a campus-wide audit of the University of Edinburgh’s Art Collection. This has been a monumental undertaking as the collection is comprised of over 8000 objects spread across the five campuses throughout the city. Although this is still an on-going project, a key immediate outcome from the audit has been my chance to implement a barcode labeling system for the collection.

One of my main goals as Documentation Assistant for this audit has been to improve our current documentation around the Art Collection, as well as identify future priorities for things like conservation and digitisation. However, an initial barrier I have been coming up against has been finding efficient ways to locate and identify artworks in the first place.

The Art Collection is an active research collection that is regularly used for teaching, exhibitions and loans. Unlike other similar sized art collections, our objects rarely stay in the same place for very long. This, paired with other challenges involved in identifying artworks can make the auditing process pretty complicated. Limited existing documentation, unclear or non-existent labeling, as well as outdated locations, all increase the risk of artworks becoming disassociated from the collection or even lost entirely if not properly addressed!

Art Collection in Storage

It was clear that we needed to have a better way of identifying our collection if we wanted to tackle some of these issues. As a result, I decided to implement a new barcode labeling system for all artworks we have in our collections stores. This project built off of existing efforts to barcode the Musical Instrument Collection and works in tandem with our collections management system, Vernon CMS.

New Barcode Labels Ready to Be Attached

Barcode labels are made for artworks after each phase of our audit is completed so that the object and location information is as current and accurate as possible. The process for making barcodes is pretty simple, but effective. Each label has both the object accession number as well as a barcode with the unique ID number that relates to that specific object’s record on Vernon.

The labels are printed out and stuck onto an acid free archival tag that can be safely and securely attached to the artwork using object-safe materials like un-dyed cotton tape or string. When this label is scanned into our collections management system, the exact record that relates to that object will be brought up, considerably reducing the chances of misidentification or disassociation.

Marble Bust Sporting its New Label

We’ve already started to see the positive impact of having these new labels in place in our team’s day-to-day collections management. Collections are now much easier to identify at a glance without direct handling and location updates during complex store moves take half the time they normally do!

‘Punishment of Dirce’ (EU0663) Bronze Sculpture with New Label

Like the audit this project is on-going, but good progress is being made with the help of volunteers and now over 1500 individual artworks have been barcoded! It has been exciting to see such immediate improvement in our daily practice through the addition of something so simple and it just goes to show how important core documentation work is to managing collections effectively. I am looking forward seeing what other improvements to our documentation practices we can make in the future!