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by Randy Hees,
President, Society for the Preservation of Carter
Railroad Resources
One of the difficult problems which confronts any
museum of industrial
technology is how to catalog the collection. Conventional
record keeping
systems have trouble dealing with a working industrial
artifact. What
makes theseartifact so difficult to deal with is their changing nature. As
they are restored, and used (and in some cases used up)
they change, and
most cataloging systems don't deal with change well.
Over the last 15 years the Society for the Preservation of
Carter Railroad
Resources (SPCRR)has developed a collection system which is able to
deal with these issues. Our primary collection list is
parts based. We try
identify and separately catalog all discrete components of
an assembly.
We do this for several reasons; first our collection is
comprised of a great
variety of items ranging from fragments and car parts to
single books or
photographs, to complete railroad cars, any system we
choose had to be
able to record all of these. Second, many of our artifacts
were badly
deteriorated and require restoration, we needed a system
capable of
recording parts which were replaced during restoration.
Third, we wanted
to be able to use our collection as a research tool,
comparing parts from
different sources to track both the similarities and the
differences in the
cars in our collection. Finally, we developed our system
so that a parts list
could be generated for any car listing each part, what it
is attached to, and
what bolt(s) are used to attach it. The second way we
organize our
collection is by use of the "collection" system. We use collections as
the
way we acquire and record ownership. Items are accessioned
into our
collection as blocks (collections) of items. These items
are then cataloged
into our database as resources permit, or in the case of
large complex items
such as cars as they are disassembled and restored.
Collections normally
carry the name of the donor as the collection name. A file
is maintained for
each collection holding the ownership documents and any
supporting
historic information.
But, there areproblems with a parts based system. This means that within
the system a railroad car exists only as the sum of its
catalogued parts, or
as a collection name, but not as a single functional unit.
This weakness in
the system is further complicated by restoration and even
routine
maintenance as original parts are removed either because of
their
deteriorated condition or because they don't match the era
we are restoring
the car to, or simply to prevent damage due to use. In
these cases the
original part is placed in protective storage and a replica
replaces it on the
car. Within this system a car would be found by a search
based on its
collection name. This search would produce a list of parts
which would
include: 1) original parts which are installed on of the
car, 2) modern
reproduction parts on the car, 3) historic (original) parts
in storage, 4) and
a collection of drawings, photos, field notes and other
documents. It might
include, 5) parts removed from this car, and used to
restore another car in
our collection. The list would not include parts on the
carbody which have
not (yet) been catalogued and therefore do not exist in the
system, nor
would it include historic parts from other collections we
hold. In no way
would this list of parts describe the railroad car in
question.
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