Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections: A Practical Guide for Museums

This book is a practical guide for everyone who is confronted with a collection that hasn’t seen any preventive conservation or cataloging before. It helps gaining an overview, defining priorities, and organizing the work in a way it is safe for the objects and the people involved. It defines ＂logical exits＂, goals to work towards where the collection is in a state the next steps can wait without risking the progress made. Later on, readers learn to define their own ＂logical exits＂ that fit their specific situation.

Compared to other books about collections management it doesn’t focus on the details of collections care, but rather on the big picture of managing such a project. It assumes that at the beginning there is nothing but the reader and an unmanaged collection, so that part of the project is to source money, material, and people to help.
The second edition has a new chapter on setting up collections management systems, the original text was reworked and in parts enhanced, there are additional success stories in the last chapter with references to them in the text, and the bibliography now contains some resources for natural history, indigenous, and archaeological collections.

Angela Kipp is currently professional services specialist at Gallery Systems helping clients transitioning their workflows into TMS Collections and an independent museum consultant. She graduated as Diplom-Museologin (FH) in Museum Studies from the Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University of Applied Sciences) in Berlin. Starting off as travelling database troubleshooter and project assistant for various exhibitions, Kipp has worked in the museum field since 1998 for museums of all sizes. Since then she has seen, worked for, and advised about many unmanaged or only partly managed collections. From 2004 until 2019 she was collections manager of the TECHNOSEUM, one of the three largest science and technology museums in Germany. Her job there encompassed optimizing storage and logistics and moving one third of the collection to two remaining warehouses when one had to be closed in 2006 and incorporating various large, previously unmanaged collections, each with more than 1,000 objects, into the existing collection.