Palmerston Railway Heritage Museum

The Goal

The goal for the summer was to develop an archiving system for the museum that would be the basis for the future of archiving at the museum and create a manual by the end of the summer to ensure the process could be consistent in the future.

While starting the process of cataloguing all the books, object, photographs, and archives (paper) in the museum.

Constraints‍

• Given the PastPerfect Software from the township
• One days training by the Wellington County Museum on the basics of handling artifacts and basic archiving systems
• a limited budget for materials

See the live archive on the museum website here.

Deliverables

• Archival System
• Manual for future coordinators and summer students
• Begin the archiving process of the library, objects, photographs and archives
  

My Role - beyond the project

As a Museum Coordinator the project of archiving was a major responsibility but also not the primary priority of the museum. Visitor experience always came first, this meant that if we had a busy week with lots of guest I might not have had a lot of time to archive artifacts into the system; time management was critical to complete all the projects for the summer.

The Process

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Part 1
System Development

With the Wellington County Museum training I was able to figure out the basics of the PastPerfect Software, prototyping archiving systems and handle the artifacts.

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Step 1:
I determined all the variables that went into creating a complete record of an archive. For example: (type of artifact, location, donor, donation date, and order in the sequence)

Step 2:
Using iterative prototyping I was able to test how different number systems worked and how flexible they were to future changes.

Step 3:
Created a workflow and checklists to make sure that steps where not skipped in the accession process (the archiving process)

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Part 2
Archiving

Once I had a basic number system done I began archiving artifacts. Beginning with the library and then with the all of the objects on the first floor of the museum. As I continued accessioning artifacts I improved and streamlined the system aswell as recorded all the special use cases.

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Part 3
Creating a Manual

To ensure that the system could be used by future summer students, I wrote a manual which went through all the processes, workflows and special use cases.

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Outcome

By the end of the term I had:

• Developed an archival system
• Wrote a thorough manual for future employees to be trained off of
• archived 1700+ artifacts
• taken 2500+ pictures to accompany the records

The catalogue is being updated each year with my manual as the guide to maintain consistency and quality of records.