HELP! We’re opening a new living history museum. How do we manage the artifacts?
Each year that question is asked by groups across North America, and alternatively, smaller organizations that have been in existence for many years often ask the same question.
Here is a small collection of information and links to FREE online resources that have been written, gathered and shared by numerous organizations. Hopefully these will help those people and organizations who are new to managing museum collections - or for those who need a refresher.
These resources are being shared by the Collections, Preservation and Registration PIG - one of the Professional Interest Groups - of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM).
If you want to search and explore more information that is specific to living history and agricultural museums, we encourage you and your museum to become members of ALHFAM. ALHFAM hosts an annual conference with published Proceedings of papers that are presented at the Association’s conference. Hundreds of these papers can be searched and accessed on the ALHFAM members’ only webpage – it’s a benefit of paid membership in the Association.
Museum policies are important because they provide a guide for how to build your collection. We often see questions about whether or not a museum should add an artifact to their collection, and the easiest way to answer that question is to look at the collections policy. It spells out what types of artifacts your museum should collect.
Collections policies also help when you have a board member or a donor who wants to do things in a way that could cause problems, like donating an artifact without filling out any paperwork. A board member may have authority over you, but the collections policy has authority over everyone in the museum when it comes to your collections. Point to it, and that can be the final say.
“Can be” is an important phrase here. Remember that it’s not good enough just to have a policy – your museum needs to put these policies into practice. Just like any other good set of rules, a collections policy can only guide you and keep you out of trouble if you follow it.
An extremely important note to make is that states and provinces often have laws about how a museum should handle artifacts. Museums with lots of resources will consult a legal expert when they craft their collections policy. If your site doesn’t have access to legal advice and you need to copy another museum’s policy, then try to at least use a model from your state or province.
Examples of collections policies can be found online at:
Farmer’s Museum, Cooperstown, New York
The Farmers' Museum Collections Management Policy-2003-07-17
See also their updated Collection Policy - collection_management_policy_08.2022.pdf
Province of Alberta - applicable to numerous museums including historic houses and living history villages
Arts, Culture and Status of Women Collections Policy
Nova Scotia Museum - applicable to numerous museums including historic houses, farm sites, and living history villages
Revised May 28, 2010
Wayland Historical Society, Grout-Heard House, Wayland, Massachusetts
Microsoft Word - Collections Management Policy -FINAL_Approved by Board OCTOBER 2018.docx
Genesee Country Village, Mumford, New York
https://www.gcv.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/COLLECTIONS_POLICY_Amended_March_2015.pdf
Again, try to find and use a collections policy from your state/province as a basis for your museum’s policies!
There are numerous online resources with examples and templates of collections forms such as Deeds of Gift, Temporary Receipts and others developed and used by other museums. Use these collections forms as examples only - i.e., don’t copy these forms and just change the museum’s name. The forms that your organization uses should be unique to your museum.
Remember that you should have any forms that you develop reviewed by legal counsel, preferably someone who has experience in the donation and management of cultural property and has legal experience in your state/province/country.
See for example:
Steps_for_Creating_a_Deed_of_Gift.pdf
A Guide to Deeds of Gift | Society of American Archivists
American Association for State and Local History Deed of gift
Inventorying Large Collections
Many museums have a large number of objects that have never been catalogued - maybe the entire collection has never been catalogued. What do you do? Where do you start?
Mass object inventories do take time but it is possible to focus your efforts on a basic inventory of all the objects in the museum’s collection.
This video from the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia gives lots of great advice about how to do an object inventory. See Inventorying Collections for Museums
Collections Management Software
A Collections Management System, also known as a CMS, is a computer software database that allows a museum to store, manage, and search data. As it relates to the artifact collection, a CMS will allow a museum to store data about artifacts, the history and description of each artifact, track an artifact’s location, store research files, record an artifact’s condition, donor information, etc.
Over the years, many museum cataloguing systems have been developed, some that are unique to three-dimensional objects, others to archival, fine art, or archaeological collections. To assess which of these many programs is the best solution for managing your museum’s collection, consult with your museum colleagues in your county and/or state/province - what do they use?
In 2016, the Canadian Heritage Information Network did a survey of CMS that museums used at the time; although there have been many advancements in computer technology, that survey and other documents developed by CHIN may be useful in helping your museum move forward in purchasing and implementing a CMS. See Collections management systems - Canada.ca
Here are links to some CMS programs used by living history museums, historic houses and other museums to manage their artifact collections. ALHFAM is NOT endorsing these programs but they may serve as a starting point for your museum’s review of what CMS is best for your collection.
PastPerfect: The World’s Leading Collections Management Software
Argus Museum Collections Management Software | Lucidea
CatalogIt - Powerful, Intuitive Museum & Private Collections Management
CollectionsIndex+ from System Simulation Ltd (SSL)
Home | CollectiveAccess
If these programs are too expensive, or if your museum collection isn’t large enough to warrant a commitment to one of these CMS, there are less expensive programs intended for private collectors. See for example Recollector, which can be customized for a museum’s collection - Recollector.
It may come as a surprise to some people who are new to the museum world that artifacts are physically numbered. But how and where to apply or attach a number on a plough, or a threshing machine?
Here are two resources that will help your museum standardize the process of numbering artifacts, with lots of practical suggestions for labeling artifacts:
How_to_Label_Historic_Artifacts.pdf
Numbering Museum Collections - Northern States Conservation Center
Collections Care and Conservation
The care and conservation of museum artifacts can be an involved, scientific and artistic process that may require consultation with a trained conservator. If you are taking on basic conservation tasks yourself, remember to do no harm to the object and whatever you do should be documented and reversible.
Learn the differences between conservation and restoration – know which is most appropriate for the artifact (and its use) that you are treating. And know when it may be more appropriate to acquire a brand new reproduction of the object.
If you need to consult or hire a conservator, search here:
USA – American Institute for Conservation -Find a Professional Member - American Institute for Conservation
Canada – Canadian Association for Professional Conservators -Working with a Conservator – Canadian Association of Professional Conservators
Online artifact conservation resources include:
National Park Service Conserve-O-Grams are short guides to all sorts of topics in preserving artifacts, including storage, disaster management, cleaning, and more
Foundations for Advancement in Conservationhttps://connectingtocollections.org/
CCI technical notes
Preventive conservation guidelines for collections - Canada.ca
Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) Notes - Canada.ca
Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) Technical Bulletins - Canada.ca
Most living history museums have some indoor space that requires regular housekeeping … an historic house, a trades building, or the inside of a barn.
Housekeeping may be the responsibility of a curator, historical interpreters, a maintenance worker, or a contract cleaning company. Some living history museums do a major cleaning of indoor spaces once or twice per year, with ongoing maintenance as required on a regular basis, while other museums are able to commit financial and staff resources to cleaning on a daily or weekly basis. Whatever your museum is able to do, remember that DUST is one of the most damaging elements to the museum’s collection.
Here’s a great resource on housekeeping - Housekeeping for Historic Homes and House Museums - written by Melissa Weaver from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Housekeeping/Historic Trust.
Fairfax County Park Authority in Virginia has developed a Housekeeping Manual for the historic properties that they manage: Housekeeping Manual, Museum Collections
Preservation Housekeeping for Heritage Sites and Small Museums
Living history museums may have issues related to pests that are more pronounced than traditional museums. Open-air spaces such as barns and farm outbuildings are attractive to many pests such as rodents, bats, and insects. Know that some pests can pose health risks to staff and visitors, e.g., hantavirus spread in rodent droppings, and histoplasmosis in bat guano.
Many structures at living history museums are constructed of wood - framing, siding, and roofing materials; these can be prone to termites, powder post beetle, and other wood boring insects. These insects can cause significant damage to buildings - and artifacts - and their treatment requires consultation with and treatment by pest management professionals.
Resources related to pest management include:
Museumpests.net | A Product of the Integrated Pest Management Working Group
Historyonics-Guide-to-Pest-Management-in-Museums-2024.pdf
Sadly, every year we read in the media about communities that are devastated by floods, fire, tornadoes and other natural disasters. Sometimes museums are caught up in these disasters - so it’s a good idea to develop an emergency preparedness plan for your museum.
Writing an emergency preparedness plan can be a daunting task, but here are templates that will help your museum:
Emergency Planning Toolkit prepared by the Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service in England, Microsoft Word - Emergency-Planning-Document-v3-Aug08.doc
HELP! An Emergency Preparedness Manual for Museums prepared by the Alberta Museums Association, Alberta Museums Association - Museum Flood Funding
A Disaster Plan for Museums, published by the Texas Historical Commission, A DISASTER PLAN
Be Prepared - Guidelines for Small Museums for Writing a Disaster Preparedness Plan, published by the Commonwealth of Australia on behalf of the Heritage Collections Council, CAN-Be-Prepared.pdf
The largest artifact in your museum’s collection is likely not a threshing machine nor a steam engine – it’s one of the buildings. A barn, a house, or a modern purpose-built museum or interpretive center.
Depending on what the preservation issues are with the museum’s structures, you may need to consult a structural engineer or an architect who specializes in historic buildings. And don’t forget to consult with local, state/provincial and/or federal governments regarding the legal requirements for how building repairs and alterations are undertaken.
Here are some online resources that may help:
The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties provides “guidance to historic building owners and building managers, preservation consultants, architects, contractors, and project reviewers prior to beginning work.” See The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties - Technical Preservation Services (U.S. National Park Service)
Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada, Second Edition, published in 2010, 81468-parks-s+g-eng-web2.pdf
Artifact and Object Identification
When cataloguing a museum’s collection, it’s important to be consistent in how artifacts are named. Nomenclature - “a structured and controlled list of object terms organized in a classification system to provide a basis for indexing and cataloging collections of human-made objects” was developed to help museums.
Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging website is a collaboration between several American and Canadian organizations including the American Association for State and Local History, Parks Canada, and others. See online: About Nomenclature - Nomenclature. Also see the Canadian Heritage Information Network data dictionaries CHIN Data Dictionaries - Canada.ca
Here are some online resources that may help you catalog specific types of objects in your collection:
Furniture and decorative arts -Different Antique Furniture Terminology From A to Z. - Antiques Worldis a glossary of furniture terminology you can use to identify decorative elements in your furniture collection.
Photographs - The Northeast Documents Conservation Center has an online guide to help identify different types of photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See 5.2.1 Types of Photographs, part 1: 19th and Early 20th Century — NEDCC
Bottles - The Bureau of Land Management in partnership with the Society for Historical Archaeology has an online guide to help identify bottles. See Historic Bottle Website - Homepage
Twentieth century materials - Common 20th Century Artifacts – A Guide to Dating – Welcome to the Society for Historical Archaeology
Trades - published in 1863, “The Encyclopedia of early Encyclopedia of early American trade : the panorama of professions and trades” may help identify tools and their use in the nineteenth century. See a copy of this publication in the United States Library of Congress at The panorama of professions and trades, | Library of Congress
White Wheat Earthenware ceramics - The Wheat Pattern - An Illustrated Survey - English.pdf (From Parks Canada’s collection of research publications; for more titles see also below.)
Parks Canada has published research on many types of artifacts such as bottle glass, artillery, trade ornaments, tableware, and military buttons. Many of these publications can be accessed from the webpage for the Society for Historical Archaeology: Parks Canada Resources – Welcome to the Society for Historical Archaeology
If you are cataloging artifacts dating from the late 1800s through the 1900s, mail order catalogs can be a great source of information to help identify objects. For example, Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs are available on Ancestry.com - and the catalogs are searchable.
Mail order catalogs and reference books about specific topics can also be found on HathiTrust Digital Library, on the Internet Archive and on Project Gutenberg.
Within ALHFAM there are several Professional Interest Groups that may be able to help with identifying and cataloging artifacts, e.g., HAT - Historic Apparel & Textiles, Machinery.
Provenance - “the history of an object from its creation, including past owners or caretakers, and how it changed hands over time and from place to place” - is most often associated with fine art, ethnographic, archaeological, and paleontological collections but it applies equally to every object in a museum’s collection.
When your living history museum accepts a new artifact into the collection, it’s important to ask questions of the donor or seller, e.g., what is the history of the artifact, how did they acquire the artifact, who has owned it previously, how was it used, etc.
Provenance research can be time consuming, and it may not be possible to determine complete provenance for every artifact in a museum’s collection.
“Provenance research works backward in time. … it starts with how the work entered the collection (such as through gift or purchase), then investigates how and when the donor or dealer acquired the work, then looks at who possessed it before them, and so on, ideally tracing back to the artist(s), maker(s), or place where it was unearthed.” (from Brooklyn Museum).
Determining provenance will likely start with the museum’s own documentation of its collection, such as Deeds of Gift, catalogue records, correspondence, etc. - emphasizing how important creating and maintaining these documents is when a museum acquires an object.
For a great explanation of provenance, see the Brooklyn Museum’s explanation of “how did the art get here” at Provenance ยท Brooklyn Museum and the Museums Association of Saskatchewan tipsheet on provenance tipsheet_provenance.pdf.
For a deeper dive into provenance research, see Nancy Yeide’s book The AAM Guide to Provenance Research, published by the American Association of Museums in 2001.
Whether you work at an historic house museum, farm site, military site, or a living history village, ideally there will be a furnishing plan that compiles research on the property, building(s), family history, and appropriate artifacts and/or reproductions required to furnish the buildings and landscape.
There have been many papers and workshops given at ALHFAM conferences about researching and writing furnishing plans; if you are a paid member of ALHFAM, you have access to many of these on the Association’s webpage.
Here are online examples of some furnishing plans that will help guide you to develop a furnishing plan at your living history site:
From the National Park Service - NPS Museum Handbook, Part III Chapter 8: Using Museum Collections in Historic Furnished Structures
You will also find a chapter on furnishing plans in “The Basics of Writing Furnishing Plans,” by Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Michael L. Woodcock, edited by Martha B. Katz-Hyman, et al, in The Living History Anthology Perspectives from ALHFAM, Routledge, 2019, available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers. This chapter is also available, in slightly different form, for ALHFAM members in the ALHFAM Skills & Knowledge database (ASK) on the ALHFAM website.
Many living history museums manage archival collections, e.g., the private papers of a home or farm owner, correspondence, ephemera from the 1800s and 1900s, photographs, greeting cards, etc. And don’t overlook the records of your own institution - founding documents, photographs of events and exhibits through the years, board minutes, etc.
Collections management in an archive has many similarities, but some distinct differences, from collections management of three-dimensional museum collections.
In small to mid-size museums, managing paper records often is done by a curator or registrar without archival or records management training. Online resources that will help you with management of these collections include:
Archival Management: A Guide for Organizing, Cataloging, and Preserving Collections of Papers, Photographs, and Other Records
Archives Association of British Columbia - Archivist Toolkit
Archaeological Collections and NAGPRA
Some living history museums are stewards of and manage archaeological collections, e.g., Indigenous and/or historic artifacts excavated on the living history museum’s property, or in nearby communities.
Archaeological artifacts, field notes and drawings, and photographs need to be managed so that the information is accessible to your museum and to researchers.
Advice and examples of how best to manage these collections can be found at the following:
Caring for Archaeological Collections, from CCI (Canadian Conservation Institute), Caring for archaeological collections - Preventive conservation guidelines for collections - Canada.ca
In the United States, NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) may apply to archaeological collections that your museum manages. It may also apply to artistic objects of particular cultural significance. See the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service) for an overview of the subject, and the NAGPRA Online In-Depth Training Seminars for a tutorial on how to build a NAGPRA policy for your site.
If your site has a lot of archeological excavations and/or collections related to Indigenous culture, then we highly recommend writing a policy in advance. There can be a lot of work that needs to be done fast if you come across something sensitive, so having a guide ready will be a big help! It will also help you have a good relationship with the federally recognized tribes who have an interest in your county.
In Canada, Indigenous archaeological collections are governed by each province, following historical precedents, contemporary issues and legislation regarding repatriation of Indigenous remains and cultural objects. NAGPRA does not apply in Canada, and Canada does not have equivalent federal legislation.
Moved to Action: Activating UNDRIP in Museums, the Canadian Museum Association’s report answering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action #67, was released in 2022. Alongside a national review of museum policies to determine the level of compliance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the report makes 10 recommendations and offers 30 new standards for museums to support Indigenous-led self-determination in museums. Moved to Action: Activating UNDRIP in Canadian Museums – A Response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Call to Action #67
To “understand the context of the colonial legacy of museums and support reconciliation and repatriation initiatives”, see how museums in Ontario are working to implement the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Canadian Museums Association report, see OMA Resources - OMA Resource Hub.
Many historic houses and living history museums are seasonal. Depending on where the museum is located, they may be closed during the cold winter months or hot summer months. There are special considerations in operating a museum seasonally.
For advice on closing a museum seasonally, see this CCI (Canadian Conservation Institute) Note: Closing a Museum for the Winter – Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) Notes 1/3 - Canada.ca
Many living history museums incorporate exhibits into their visitors’ experience. These exhibits may range from outdoor interpretive panels, to static displays in historic buildings, to interpretive centres, to artifacts in display cases in climate-controlled museum environments.
See the following resource for an overview of the steps to follow in planning, designing and installing an exhibit. Guide-to-Exhibit-Development.pdf
There are many design software products that can be used to plan, layout, and illustrate an exhibit and/or to create other designed projects such as brochures, exhibit catalogues, signage, trade show displays, etc. One product that is easy to use is Canva - “a free-to-use online graphic design tool”. Although Canva is free to use, not-for-profit organizations can register with Canva to obtain free access to their Pro suite of tools with more templates and AI features. See their webpage for access to Canva - https://www.canva.com
There are thousands of great reference books and journal articles about the management of museum collections. Here are a few titles that members of the CPR Pig suggest that you consult. It may not be necessary to purchase these books; you should be able to borrow them through interlibrary loan from your local public or college library.
Angela Kipp, Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections: A Practical Guide for Museums. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016.
Marie C. Malaro and Ildiko Pogany DeAngelis, A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections, Fourth Edition. Smithsonian Books, 2025.
Daniel B. Reibel, Registration Methods for the Small Museum, Fifth Edition. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017.
John E. Simmons, Things Great and Small: Collection Management Policies. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
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