Other class contacts: Course Description

Museums can be defined as objects organized within a specific intellectual environment. This course is an opportunity for students to analyze and evaluate the range of recordkeeping systems that have been used by museums to document their collections, and the physical and intellectual environment in which records are created, used and maintained. Records of lasting value to museums include both those records that document individual objects in the museum's collection and those that document the business of the museum in acquiring, preserving and interpreting those objects. Beginning with an overview of the history of museums and the roles of museum staff in creating and using museum records, students will identify the various types of records created by a museum in the course of its business of building, maintaining and using collections of objects. Functional analysis will be used as an archival appraisal technique to examine the organizational structure of a museum, in order to determine what records are created by the museum in the course of its business, which of those records are essential to the museum and where those records are likely to be created and maintained in a given museum. Students will examine internal and external policies governing the activities of th