Collections management (museum)

Collections management involves the development, storage, and preservation of collections and cultural heritage. The primary goal of collections management is to meet the needs of the individual collector or collecting institution's mission statement, while also ensuring the long-term safety and sustainability of the cultural objects within the collector's care. Collections management, which consists primarily of the administrative responsibilities associated with collection development, is closely related to collections care, which is the physical preservation of cultural heritage. The professions most influenced by collections management include collection managers, registrars, and archivists.

Cultural heritage collections require a great deal of care and protection in order to ensure their safety from external loss or damage, but they also require in-depth documentation to assist in tracking the life of the object within the holding institution. To accommodate these needs, collectors adhere to collections management and collections care standards and practices, which serve to create a safe environment for collection objects with clear and precise accompanying documentation. Where collections care addresses the physical actions necessary to prevent or delay damages of cultural heritage, collection management can be defined as "a process of information gathering, communication, coordination, policy formulation, evaluation, and planning." These processes influence decisions about records management and the collections management policy, which outlines protocols for the collection scope, collections care, and emergency planning and response.

According to the Smithsonian Institution, a record is "any official, recorded information, regardless of medium or characteristics which are created, received, and maintained" by an individual collector or institution. As every object within a collection must have accompanying documentation, records management functions as the primary focus of collections management, and covers a wide range of documentation and policy standards. Topics covered under the umbrella of records management include collection information management systems, collections accession and deaccession policies, collection management policies, cataloging, and curation. The lack of appropriate record keeping systems in museums compromises the security of museum collections and threatens the role of museums as information centres. Planned and systematised management of records im-proves museums’ programmes and activities thereby leading to effective governance and operation of the museum.

...
Wikipedia