Fifteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Multiple methods and processes of object documentation have been used since the establishment of the historic and contemporary dress collection in the 1930s, known since 2018 as The Fashion Archive. This produced a collection of unorganized, undocumented, and inaccessible objects. Advances in technology have provided unique opportunities to rethink, redesign, and reemploy the ways in which previously time-consuming tasks within the process of accessioning an object into a museum collection are performed. Resulting data can be much more easily and accurately accessed, imported, and exported into a variety of systems. This paper describes the process of utilizing technology to digitize records in The Fashion Archive, developing and beta testing the efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility of an online database for the documentation of objects. For this study, 276 objects located in 56 boxes, housed in two sections of the high-density storage unit, were photographed. Physical documents were scanned, reviewed, and edited using the terminology and classification systems of ICOM. All the associated data for each object was entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and links were created to connect the external documents and object photographs housed in the cloud. The main outcome of this project is clean and verifiable data ready to be migrated to a web-based collections management database. The digitization of all documentation associated with each of the objects in the collection should be a high priority for not only the safekeeping of records but to make them easily accessible for both internal and external users.