Collections Management a la Blog

A brief but meta museum musing from me today: as my co-editor Ava and I have been settling into our new editor roles, we’ve been performing some site maintenance. When we first started, because of the nearly fifteen-year history of the blog, the media gallery was bursting with content. The creativity, cleverness, and ingenuity of our blog ancestors meant that there were hundreds upon hundreds of images, graphics, and visuals in the media gallery. These visual aids had been used in posts since the blog’s inception and ran the gamut from statistical figures to exhibition photos.

At first, this wasn’t something even meriting consideration—the photos were a part of collective blog history and were essentially ephemera in an archive of past Tufts Museum Studies history. But we quickly encountered an issue: because of the amount of storage space taken up by these visual aids, no new ones could be uploaded. Until some photos were deleted, there would be no space for current and future authors to add visuals to their articles.

So we faced a conundrum: preserve blog history and the work of previous students or preserve future authors’ flexibility? It felt like an impossible task, in some ways. I understand that the presence or lack of photos with articles on a university blog may seem trivial, but to me, it felt like a question of respect. I wanted to give credit to the students who shaped this blog at the same time as uplifting my current peers. The blog is dedicated to supporting both current and former Tufts Museum Studies students—how could we do both when one group had to be prioritized for storage’s sake?

And then I realized something: this is essentially collections management on a much smaller, perhaps less strenuous scale. These media items are a part of the blog’s collection. Much as museum objects can be deaccessioned when they no longer serve the mission of the museum or when there is no longer space for them to be stored, so too must blog visual aids. I recalled something Elizabeth Farish, Chief Curator at Strawbery Banke said when I met with her—paraphrased, she articulated that every artifact or historical object is important, but circumstance determines whether it is useful in a particular context. Essentially, even if a museum turns down an object donation from an individual, that object is still important; it may just not fit with the current needs of the museum.

The solution we settled on, for the purposes of the blog, is a five-year retention policy: for five years after an article is posted, any visual aids will remain attached. After five years, the visuals will be deleted to make space for new images from present authors. The articles themselves will remain intact and in place—anyone coming to the blog will be able to read the wonderful work of our peers past, present, and future. Just the images will be “deaccessioned.” To echo the statement above, this makes no judgement of the images’ importance—they are all important in that the original author deemed them fitting to accompany their writing and that our blog ancestors chose them—it merely allows for the “collection” to stay current.

So at least for the present, while Ava and I are editors, older graphics will be removed to make space for new ones. If the policy is in place long-term, my work could have its photos removed. In fact, if you’re reading this in May 2030 or beyond, you may see an article devoid of the accompanying graphic I created. Or maybe not—the policy itself may be “deaccessioned” by future editors. That remains to be seen! But it is almost comforting that the mark we make on this virtual space will be both ephemeral and permanent at the same time—and isn’t that history?