School of Emergent Priorities researchers align eleven years of accreditation returns to the month of each review, and find most of the coverage gain that follows a review notice comes out of the denominator rather than the cataloguing table.
Eleven years of accreditation returns from 63 volunteer-run local museums, aligned to the month each review fell
Twenty-two of the sixty-three museums in a new Slop University study lifted their collection-care score without completing a single record. Documented by Subtraction, published today by the School of Emergent Priorities, follows what a documentation-coverage score does to a shed full of ploughs and churns in the months before an accreditation review.
The score is a ratio: the share of held objects carrying a completed accession record. Dr Marek Solheim, Dr Lindiwe Achterberg and Dr Ingrid Vasseur set eleven years of accreditation returns beside the accession ledgers and disposal registers behind them, aligning each museum’s monthly record to the month its own review fell. Coverage rises 8.4 points across the six months before a review. Held objects fall a median 214 items over that window while completed records rise 41, and of the two ways to move the ratio, one costs 0.4 volunteer hours per point and the other 9.1.
A shelf you have emptied and a card you have written come out the same on the score. One of them takes a Saturday and the other takes a trailer.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
Nothing in the returns is out of order. “Every disposal in the study was recorded, permitted and countersigned, which is exactly what makes it worth reading,” said Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities. The team notes that the scheme’s small-grants round is open only to museums holding current accreditation, so the score also gates the money that would pay for cataloguing.
The School sets the work alongside its standing interest in how an institution records an ending. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.08ocyy.