I am curious to see if there is any consensus in the museum community regarding the cataloguing of objects with part/whole relationships. I realize there are countless permutations of this situation, but the prototypical example in our institution is a tea set. The tea set contains various components--teapot, cups/saucers, sugar bowls--which themselves are composed of parts--the sugar bowl lid and the bowl itself; the cup and its saucer, the teapot and its stand, etc.
We are about to implement a new collections management system (KE EMu) and currently our strategy is as follows: 1. Catalogue the various components as individual items--the pot, the bowl, the cups/saucers, all with unique numbers (2001.2.1, etc.). The components would be linked to eachother in the database as Related Objects 2. Catalogue the parts of a component in a Child relationship to that component's record--the bowl and lid, the cup and saucer, etc., all designated with letters (2001.2.1.A, etc.) We are not sure what to do about the ensemble of all the components--the tea set as a whole. It currently does not have a catalogue number, but we can imagine the usefulness of having a record for the set, in a Parent relationship to each individual component. If we do this, we have to give the set itself a unique number, or refer to it by the range of numbers it includes (2001.2.1-10), or employ a totally new (for our institution) cataloguing level, more like a scope note or folder-level record, as might be typical in a catalogue of archival material, for example. Perhaps this is a query for the AAM Registrar's Committee listserv (is anyone out there a member who would be willing to post it on my behalf?). However, if any of you have some ideas on the matter we would be interested to hear them. William Real Director of Technology Initiatives Carngie Museum of Art 412-622-3267 --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: rlancefi...@mail.wesleyan.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mcn_mcn-l-12800...@listserver.americaneagle.com
