21 Oct
2010
21 Oct
'10
4:30 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-
bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Tony Duell
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 12:18 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Cataloguing in a museum setting [was Re: nonsense...]
associated
Yes. :-)
Seriously: we do encounter this situation. When a machine comes in, it is catalogued as
an entity. If we find it necessary to remove a component from machine A to install in
machine B, the component is separately catalogued with a note in the record stating that
it was originally part of machine A.
I did this recently with a machine that came as a system containing an RK05 drive
identified as non-functional. We used the RK8-E from that machine with another PDP-8/e
that also had RK05 drives but no RK8-E.
That would not be appropriate for a machine that is historically significant in its
particular configuration (for example, our PDP-12), but that's a hard argument to make
for the vast majority of PDP-8/e's. And given the records we keep, we could restore
the accession to its original configuration if needed.
It's always a judgement call when one must balance preservation and restoration. --
Ian
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 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!).