*** Welcome to piglix ***

Inventory (museum)


An inventory is an itemized list of objects that the museum has accessioned or received via loan(s) and must be physically located by an examiner. A complete, one-hundred percent inventory, or a random inventory of the collection must be carried out periodically to ensure the museum is operating under best practices and for security purposes. The museum is legally responsible and ethically obligated for the maintenance of up-to-date information detailing the location of all objects within the collection, including loaned items and objects that have yet to be accessioned; this is stipulated by many museum associations, including the American Association of Museums.

Although inventories require a large amount of work and are not part of the more glitzy side of museum work, their value is nonetheless extremely important. The upkeep of the collections’ inventory record is needed for minimum collections accountability. Inventories provide the collections manager and or the registrar with information for insurance purposes, security, and alerts staff to possible conservation or preservation needs of the collection.

The completion and upkeep of and an inventory system helps to deter and aid in the early detection of theft of the collection. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) urges museums to complete and maintain their inventory systems because "If a museum does not know what is in its collection, where the works are located, and the condition they are in, it, in effect, invites theft because it will have no immediate sense that an object has disappeared, and most important, it will have no descriptive information to aid the recovery of an object in the event of a theft."

The type of inventory system used by a museum will be dictated by the Collections Management Policy (CMP). The CMP will determine how often items, what items, and how many items are to be inventory. Museums need to periodically complete a one-hundred percent inventory of their collection, but for the period in between the completion of such an inventory, a random sampling of the collection is sufficient. A random sampling of the collection serves as an indicator for the rest of the collection. If all the items are accounted for in a random sampling, then it can be assumed that rest of the collections’ records is just as reliable. However, a complete inventory provides the institution with the knowledge that the entire collection can be accounted for; the random sampling is used to check the consistency of the collections’ records.


...
Wikipedia

...