Cataloguing in a museum setting [was Re: nonsense...]

[Tony Duell]

> > I'd like to hear more about what constitutes "cataloging", as I'm a
> > n00b in this respect.
> 
> Just what it sounds like. :-)
> 
> When an item comes into the collection, it is assigned an accession
> number; the standard is yyyy.nnn.mmm, where nnn represents order in
> which the item came in in year yyyy, and mmm is the individual number
> of each piece that makes up the item.  If a piece is made up of
> parts (say a tea set, for example) a letter can be suffixed to the
> piece number for each part to make it possible to keep them associated
> even if physically apart.  Leading zeroes should be used in the item
> and piece numbers.

What do you mean by 'item','piece' and 'part' here? I can understand an 
item being made of several pieces, but why do you need a third level here?

In the case of a classic computer, what would you label? The casing? The 
individual PCBs/modules? How would you handle the case of taking 2 
effectively identical machines acquired at differnet times and using 
parts from bvth to make one working example, or would a museum never do 
that? (If the latter, then I consider the policy to be broken!).

-tony