Record-Keeping of Transferred/Donated Items

[Chanin Voss Scanlon]

Hello Community:

I have a record-keeping question for you.

For those of you who regularly donate/transfer items can I get a bit of a survey on how you organize your donation/transfer paperwork? For example, do you make a copy of the transfer documentation and attach it to each and every object you donated? Do you use a numbering system on your transfer/donation documentation and file your records according to that number system? If you number them, can you tell me what type of numbering system you use? Do you file the records based on the person/organization you donated/transferred the items to if you are not using a numbering system?

OK, I think you get the idea. Any thoughts on filing your donated/transferred and even deaccessioned items will be welcome.

Regards,

Chanin Voss Scanlon
Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
817-255-9305
cscanlon@fwmsh.org

[Ronald Heroux]

I file donation records chronologically and record that information in the accession record (computerized). My ultimate intent is to print a file copy of every accession record (3-ring binder). One could record the accession number on the donation document, though sometimes such number could be changed and that would add yet another correction to be made. For deaccessioned items I merely record that fact/reason on the donation form (retained).

[Mary Ames Booker]

Do you mean deaccession of items? And that paperwork? There is a standard form and that is filed with the Donor file and the Object/Item record file. And there is even a separate file for Deaccessions. Email me directly if you want a form: curator@battleshipnc.com.

[Chanin Voss Scanlon]

Thanks, Ronald and Mary for your responses.

I do have the necessary forms so it is not necessarily a form question (my apologies, the question was worded a bit muddy), it is more of a question of recordkeeping once the paperwork was complete. For example, we have a fairly large collection overall, and some donations can be large as well. In most cases our collection is cataloged on the item level. So, once we deaccession and then either transfer custody or remove an item from the collection it is easy to make those changes in the database, but then we have the paperwork associated with that deaccession as well and I am trying to figure out if others have separate files where they store their deaccession paperwork and do they, as Ronald mentioned, file the deaccession paperwork separately (from the accession record) and chronologically, by accession number, or do they merely file that information back with the accession records themselves which will then create a rather large accession file if we are dealing with one accession that has many many items. We could also file deaccession paperwork separately by their object id…so I just wanted to know if anyone had a tried-and-true system for organizing their deaccession paperwork.

Chanin

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