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Bulk Accessioning and The SPECTRUM Standard
(SPECTRUM Procedure: Acquisition)

This document was written, and licensed for publication by the Collections Trust.

What is 'bulk accessioning'?

Bulk accessioning is the process of assigning one accession number to a large group of similar items. It is particularly used with archaeological, natural history, photographic and archive collections, which typically involve huge quantities of very similar, related individual items, e.g. a box of sherds, a tray of insects or an album of bus tickets. In these cases it may not be practical or useful to create a separate record for each item and a single group accession record may suffice.

What does SPECTRUM say about it?

SPECTRUM states that bulk accessioning may be necessary in some cases.

In the SPECTRUM procedure Acquisition, the minimum standard includes:

'Ensure that a unique number is assigned to, and physically associated with, all objects;'

Under the sub-procedure Accessioning the Object, it says:

'Assign a unique number to the object. The organisation should have a policy for deciding the format of its numbers. Parts of a single object may be assigned the same root number but with a unique extension appended to each one. Where large numbers of similar objects are gathered together in a secure container, the container may be numbered, its contents counted and the total recorded (e.g. beads in a box, a box of sherds, a tray of insects).'

What does the Museum Accreditation Standard say about it?

The Accreditation Standard accepts that items may be accessioned in groups. It says:

'.. a museum should have an accession record and a location for all items, or groups of items'
(MLA Accreditation Guidelines, 2004, paragraph 4.4.3)

What do museum professionals say about it?

This factsheet was informed by an MDA workshop on tackling large backlogs of undocumented objects, which was held at Armley Mills, Leeds in 1999. A key message from this workshop was that bulk accessioning is a useful tool, but only as part of a process to increase accountability and accessibility. There are situations where bulk accessioning is not appropriate or useful.

Accessioning creates a list of objects for which the museum is accountable but it does not make that information, or the objects, accessible. To make collections accessible, accessioning must always be followed by cataloguing. In many cases where it is possible to accession groups of objects in bulk, it is only possible to make them accessible by cataloguing them individually

When to bulk accession (and when to avoid it)

It is important to remember that the accession register acts as a formal list of an institution's collection and that it should be clear from an accession register for which items the museum is responsible.

General principles for bulk accessioning are:

  • Items must belong together as a group.
    It is essential that groups come from the same donor. Groups of items should not be created if it is not clear that they have a common donor. For example, many museums own lots of versions of the same photograph. These should not be put together as a group just because they are the same image. The acquisition details may be different.
  • Items with no information attached to them do not count as a group.
    For example, six undocumented kettles found in a museum store should not be accessioned as a group. Further information about their provenance may come to light later on.
  • For security reasons, when bulk accessioning, you should count the number of items and record this in the accession register.
    This enables you to know if any go missing.
  • It is not good practice to keep adding items to an accessioned group over a long period of time.
    It is better to make sure you find all parts of a group before you start to accession. For security purposes it is not acceptable to keep annotating and changing accession registers. For more information on sorting and creating an inventory see the Collections Trust factsheet Retrospective documentation and Making an Inventory.
  • If the items are gathered together in a secure container, the accession number can be marked on the container.
    However, if an item is going to be separated from the container then it needs to be marked separately.
  • Some collections are acquired with catalogues and their own numbering system.
    If a collection is acquired with a useable catalogue and numbering system it is often better to continue using this rather than to spend time and resources re-numbering and duplicating information. This is often the case with an archaeology collection. Such collections would still need to be accessioned using one global accession number. However, rather than allocating new accession part numbers it is often better to continue to use the original catalogue numbers.

Bulk accessioning and archaeology

Bulk accessioning and bulk cataloguing are very useful methods for dealing with archaeological archives. These often contain very large numbers of items that will never need to be made accessible individually and can only sensibly be documented in bulk. The following are extracts from Standards in Action: Working with Archaeology.

Archaeological Notes section 3
Assigning repository accession or acquisition numbers to archives

'A global accession number assigned by the receiving institution before deposition can be subdivided to number finds and the documentary archive individually or in bulk by batches, as appropriate. It will not normally be necessary or feasible to list every subdivision of the global site number in the accessions register. A brief description of the site and contents of the archive should suffice, provided that the documentation acquired as part of the archive includes a comprehensive list of the archive's contents. In the event of a museum acquiring a finds archive with no or inadequate listings on entry, it may be preferable to restrict the main register entry to a global site summary and list its components in a separate sub-register or file for that site only.'

Archaeological Notes section 12
Levels of cataloguing

'Thought should be given to the different levels of recording appropriate to SPECTRUM 1 Object Entry, 4 Inventory and 6 Cataloguing. For entry and inventory, and for certain types of enquiry, a summary list of archives and assemblages, rather than lists of every individual find, may be all that is immediately required or indeed feasible. However the museum should ensure that the level of detail is sufficient for legal reasons where transfer or deposit is made.

Museums should have clearly defined levels of cataloguing and ensure that consistency is maintained. In some cases, it may be desirable and possible to catalogue all finds and documentary archives at an item level, in others it will be more appropriate or only possible to catalogue at the level of collection or group ...'

Leeds Museums and Galleries case study
/case_studies/case_study-08

Bulk accessioning and other types of collection

Some items in other types of collection naturally lend themselves to being accessioned in bulk. For example, in social history collections tins of buttons, Meccano sets, and tool kits can all be bulk accessioned. Natural history collections are often categorised and sorted, and stored in drawers, cases, and albums. Again, if the collection is already in one container, for instance butterflies in a drawer, then the drawer can be given one number and the number of butterflies in the drawer recorded in the accession register.

Bulk accessioning and retrospective documentation

Bulk accessioning can be useful if:

If this is not the case then bulk accessioning will only be useful as part of a larger process for resolving documentation problems.

In many museums, documentation problems are difficult to unravel. When carrying out retrospective documentation most museums go through a lengthy sorting process. Before any retrospective accessioning is carried out it is important to work out the precise status of individual objects. Are the objects, for example, definitely unaccessioned or might they have been accessioned before and become disconnected from their accession numbers? Were the objects definitely gifts or were they actually loans or uncollected enquiries? For more information about tackling backlogs see the Collections Trust factsheet Retrospective documentation and Making an Inventory.

Armley Mills case study
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Accountability or accessibility

Bulk accessioning makes museums accountable for large collections of objects. If bulk accessioning is applied appropriately museums will know what they have, how many objects there are, where the objects came from and where they are located, but it does not always make collections more accessible. If a group contains a range of different objects they will need to be catalogued individually to make them accessible and usable. For example, a large group of photographs could be accessioned as one item. However the photographs could cover a wide range of subjects and it would be impossible to access information about them until they were individually catalogued.

National Railway Museum case study
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New acquisitions - think carefully

As a final word of advice, if you are thinking about acquiring a very large collection you should think about the resources you will need to accession it and make it accessible and useable before you decide to accept it. This point is underlined in the Museum Association's 2002 Code of Ethics for Museums in section 5 which discusses acquiring objects 'honestly and responsibly'. The Museums Association has also published Ethical Guidelines on Acquisition, which you should be aware of before accepting any new material for your collections.

Paragraph 2C states that:

'A museum should acquire and accession an item only after thorough consideration of its long-term value. It should believe that it can provide adequate and continuing care for the item and public access to it (without jeopardising care of and access to the existing collection).'

Paragraph 2D states that:

'The long-term resource implications of proposed acquisitions should always be considered before taking the final decision to acquire.'

With this in mind you may choose not to acquire objects in quantities that make it impossible for them to be accessioned at individual item level.

Sources of help and advice

MDA, SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard. Cambridge: MDA, 2005.

Harrison, Margaret & McKenna, Gordon. Documentation: a practical guide, Cambridge: Collections Trust, 2008.

Longworth, Christine and Wood, Barbara eds. Standards in Action: Working with Archaeology, Cambridge: MDA and Society of Museum Archaeologists, 2000.

The Collections Trust provides impartial resources for all aspects of collections information management. For more information please contact: Collections Link - 0845 838 4000.

SPECTRUM

SPECTRUM is a standard created by and for the museum profession to promote good practice in museum documentation. It covers all those areas of museum activity that produce information, and is the result of contributions from documentation practitioners in museums throughout the UK. It is available free, for non-commercial use, at: http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum

SPECTRUM defines 21 Procedures, which describe the process of documenting and managing objects in a museum.

Section 4 of the Accreditation Standard uses SPECTRUM as the basis for its documentation requirement. The 'minimum records' referred to can be achieved by following the 8 SPECTRUM Primary Procedures:

  • Object entry
  • Loans in
  • Acquisition
  • Location and movement control
  • Cataloguing
  • Object exit
  • Loans out
  • Retrospective documentation

Museum Accreditation Support - Link to support pack

Version 1.2 - Last updated July 2008.