A more modern-day cataloging system for thousands of historical objects

Preservation Long Island, the Cold Spring Harbor-based cultural heritage group, will begin a yearlong reassessment this fall of the way it catalogs and tracks its collection of 3,000 historical objects and hundreds of cubic feet of archival material. 

The work, funded by a $45,137 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, will pay for work by a museum services firm and a part-time curatorial staffer to augment a collections staff that consists of one person, curator Lauren Brincat. Preservation has six full-time staffers and an annual budget of about $1 million.

“It will allow us to be more strategic in what we add to the collection in the future, to tell more stories about underrepresented narratives,” Brincat told Newsday last week. “Maybe [it will] encourage us to tell different stories with the objects we already have.”

When the work is done, she said, it will give members of the public and historians greater access to a collection that spans four centuries of life on Long Island and is housed at Preservation’s five locations across Long Island. 

The project will start at the Joseph Lloyd Manor property in Huntington.

Tracking inventory — knowing what you have, where it is, and being able to find it — is a basic task for any museum, one Preservation started soon after its inception in 1948, Brincat said. The group still keeps ledgers, handwritten in spidery cursive in varying degrees of legibility, tracking early acquisitions by ascending number and donor, with brief object descriptions. This system became unwieldy as the collection grew, acquiring new objects through purchase or donation, shedding some that were duplicative or deteriorated.

Later, Preservation adopted a system used by many museums, assigning each object a number designating acquisition date and the order each collection of objects was received, Brincat said. 

Preservation cross-referenced its collection by subject, filling cabinets with files that pick up somewhere around book and basket and extend to wooden implements and vehicles, a lonely category that includes the group’s antique wagon. 

In the early 2000s, Brincat said, Preservation uploaded its inventory to Past Perfect, a searchable computer database used by many museums. The database’s dozens of information fields allow for a fuller biography of each object than was practical for paper records, including object photographs, appraisals and important details of provenance.

Brincat said the task of uploading, completed before she joined Preservation, was laborious and prolonged when the computer to which the data was being uploaded crashed. The database now lives on the cloud, multiple hard drives and a flash drive.

The grant work will involve scrutinizing each object to ensure it is fully and accurately described, redoing — or at least checking — record keeping over the past roughly 70 years.  

For the inventory to work the way it should, it matters, Brincat said, how an artist’s name is formatted and whether an object is described as originating in the 1700s or the 18th century.

“You’re making sure the language and how you’re describing things and identifying them is used the same way,” she said.