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.
As part of ongoing work on the University’s historic loans, Collections Registrar, Morven Rodger, investigates the history and provenance of the University’s John Rae collection.
In July 1926, the University Court agreed to lend the “John Rae Collection of Arctic and Other Relics” to the Royal Museum of Scotland. Almost a century later, The Royal Museum is now the National Museum of Scotland, and John Rae’s items remain on loan, but how and why did the University come to have these items in the first place?
In this post, Technician Robyn Rogers discusses the first events in series of Collection Care Task Days at the University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections.
In this week’s blog our Art Collection Documentation Assistant Gaby Cortes discusses the work she has been undertaking for the first phase of a campus-wide audit of the Art Collection, highlighting our student artworks on paper from the Edinburgh College of Art.
Anyone who has attended a meeting, had a conversation in the corridor, or bumped into me in one of our stores, knows that one of my main talking points for at least the past 5 years has been my ambition to undertake a campus-wide audit of the Art Collection. Obviously, there have been a few major world events that have hindered this, but it’s finally happening!
With over 8000 works in the collection, and at least 31% of them on display around campus (1845 works over 415 separate locations!), it’s not a straightforward job. We will have to gain access to office spaces, lecture halls, corridors, and seminar rooms, as well as taking a deep dive into the artworks held in storage.
Anna checking artworks in store
As usual, we rely on a spreadsheet to keep us in check. Although the most important detail is updating the location, we are also looking at the condition of the artworks, whether they need to be photographed, and what fixings are installed on the back. All of this will make it easier for us to provide access (online, for exhibition, teaching, or loan) or identify artworks that need further work to make them available. This information will be uploaded to our Collections Management Database (Vernon CMS) to enable greater location control and improve overall information on each of the artworks.
Artworks in store
The audit has begun in earnest, with 2313 works in storage listed and locations updated as of the beginning of this month. Alongside this work, our Documentation Assistant Gaby is also running trials on the use of barcodes on artworks for location control, which I’m sure you’ll be able to read about in a future blog post! We’ll be out and about on campus for the next year, so please say hello if you spot us.
Anna Hawkins
Museum Collections Manager
By Morven Rodger, Collections Registrar, Heritage Collections
As the Collections Registrar, one of my core responsibilities is coordinating loans from the University’s Heritage Collections to external exhibitions. Whenever an item from our collections is requested by another institution, I work with our conservators, curators, and technicians, while liaising with the borrowing institution, to manage the risks and help make the process as smooth as possible.
I am always excited by new loan requests, and the prospect of sharing our collections with broader audiences, but no loan is without risk, and lenders must balance the risks and benefits to justify their decision to lend. The loan request is a borrower’s opportunity to make their case, explain why they want to borrow, show that they understand the practicalities, and demonstrate the value our items will add to their exhibition.
My name is Jasmine, and I’ve been working here at the University for five and a bit months as the Collections Management Technician. I’m the other half to Robyn Rogers’ role as Collections Care Technician, whose fantastic blog post about her recent work you can read here, and I work directly with the Appraisal Archivist and Archives Collection Manager, Abigail Hartley, whose equally wonderful blog post was featured last month.
Abigail did a great job of defining appraisal and the challenges to the archivist when it comes to choosing what material to preserve. The archivist is often put in the position of assessing the ‘value’ of the record, a thorny process which comes with a number of ethical challenges. Thinking through these problems, it might seem easier to suggest that we simply keep everything we receive. If we get to keep everything, we don’t have to think through complicated questions, like what is the purpose of the record? And what is the purpose of the archivist? After all, if something has found its way into the archive, isn’t that an implicit statement of its value? Why appraise at all?