We cannot believe the summer is over! Fall is the beginning of Museum Association conference season and we are busy getting ready for and attending many virtual conferences this year. We would love to hear what conferences you are attending.
We are excited to announce that we are organizing our first webinar, offered free to the museum and collector community. On Tuesday, November 10, 1:00 pm Pacific, CatalogIt will present a thought-provoking webinar about how museums can connect with their communities using their collections. Today it is more important than ever for museums to engage with their communities digitally, using collections to connect and tell stories. Three industry experts, Barbara Henry, Kathleen McLean, and Evelyn Orantes, will discuss their experiences and share innovative ideas museums can use to engage with their audiences--even when the doors are closed. Our free webinar series will be ongoing and include topics that are timely and important for today’s museum climate and helpful to collectors and organizations alike. Watch out for an e-blast coming soon with registration details and more information.
We will soon be changing how we handle login and authentication in CatalogIt which will make our platform even more secure and help ensure that your data is safe and remains private. This change will require that you create a stronger password and allow you to enable a second form of identification (known as multi-factor authentication). We anticipate rolling-out this enhancement in the next few weeks and will be sure to give you a one-week and a one-day notification to avoid any surprises.
Museum conference season is going full steam. We just attended the AASLH annual virtual conference and enjoyed talking to those of you who also attended. Next up is the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM). We are excited to be sponsoring the Collections Track of sessions. Click here for more information on the conference.
We are also proud to support two collections sessions at the Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) on October 27 - 28: PLANNING FOR DIGITAL PROJECTS and S*%T! WHEN THINGS GO SOUTH[EAST], STORIES ABOUT COLLECTION MISHAPS. Both sessions should be informative and fun! To learn more about their virtual offerings, visit SEMC here.
Last, we will have a virtual exhibit booth at the New England Museum Association Conference in November. We hope to see you there! For more information on that conference, visit their website.
When we talk about objects in a museum, it is important to understand the difference between the terms “acquisition” and “accession.” An acquisition refers to items obtained by the museum. An accession is an acquisition that the museum formally adds to its collection to be held in public trust and administered through the collections management policy.
Today I want to talk about the CatalogIt “Acquisition” profile (available to our Museum users) - what it is for and when it is used. The “Acquisition” profile is used to record items the museum is acquiring that the museum does not plan on accessioning. Acquisitions may be accepted in different ways - purchase, gift, bequest, or transfer. These are objects that the museum would like to use and track but that it does not plan to accession. These are acquisitions of property and may be similar to objects in your collection, but are used for various reasons - from becoming part of your education collection, your exhibition prop collection, a gift of property from an important donor that you would like to track, or just a gift of property you may sell in order to benefit your museum. For more information on how to use the Acquisition profile, please visit our Blog.
Dedicated to the memory and contributions of musical icons like Tina Turner, the “Queen of Rock,” the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center offers a taste of the rich flavors of the southern experience, celebrating the music, culture, and beauty of the Tennessee Delta.
Located in Tina Turner’s one-room childhood schoolhouse, the historic Flagg Grove School’s exhibits feature the classic costumes, gold records, and memorabilia that characterize the rockstar’s career. The schoolhouse also provides a memory of what education was like for Black American students in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
In addition, the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center houses a Cotton Museum, tracing the roots of cotton in the region, the West Tennessee Music Museum, documenting the history of the “Music Highway” between Nashville and Memphis, the Hatchie River Museum, and John Estes’s Brownsville home, which preserves the history of “Sleepy” John and other Brownsville Bluesmen such as Yank Rachel and Hammie Nixon.
If you can‘t visit the Center in person, you can explore some of their collections on their CatalogIt HUB page!
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Hi! I’m Dan Rael, one of the Founders of CatalogIt, and currently the guy responsible for our sales and client services teams. My background is in Anthropology and Archaeology. My first job in the museum field was when I was in college at the University of New Mexico, where I worked at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. Later on, I worked as an archaeologist for the US Forest Service in California, on the Eldorado and Stanislaus National Forests. I also served two years in the Peace Corps, working with farmers in eastern Paraguay. I’ve been a collector of things pretty much my whole life- from seashells to stamps and coins, and later, of ethnographic art.
Needless to say, I love using CatalogIt to document my own collections—in fact, my own collection was the catalyst for CatalogIt. Perhaps my favorite feature is the ability to have my entire collection with me- on my phone- at all times. When I’m visiting a museum far from home and come across something that is very similar to an item in my collection, I can open up my record and add notes or even an image! I can show items to my collector friends or to experts in the field and add details or make corrections to my data on the fly. I’ve also documented most of my library of reference books- this has proven handy in that I no longer buy copies of books that I already have!
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