Updates from Oklahoma’s Cultural Institutions with the Recent Tornadoes

By Karen Whitecotton

As you are probably aware, there have been several catastrophic tornadoes in Oklahoma over the past few days. Of course, the loss of life and recovery of victims are the TOP priorities in this tragedy. Many museums have employees that have been personally affected from wind damage to even the loss of their homes and relatives homes (and unfortunately probably have friends and relatives who have lost their lives). With the lack of details and official information being released, the inaccessibility of the area, and the downed communication, it is difficult to discern the full impact.

In the midst of the tragedy, I wanted to update our museum colleagues around the world with a little positive news regarding Oklahoma’s cultural institutions in the wake of these disasters (we can use all the good news we can get!).

Currently, the Oklahoma Museums Association Disaster Response Team (DRT) does not have ANY reports of damage from any cultural institutions. Many museums in the central part of the state from Norman, to south Oklahoma City (OKC), to Shawnee were all in close proximity of multiple tornadoes, so it’s a relief there has not been any damage. My own museum (the Oklahoma History Center) closed Tuesday due to lack of water pressure from damage to a pumping station that has left thousands of people without water (we are now open – we are lucky to even have water when so many people still don’t).

Local museums are stepping up and helping out. Both the Oklahoma Territorial Museum (Guthrie) and the Science Museum Oklahoma (OKC) are donation collection points for disaster relief. The Science Museum Oklahoma and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (OU/Norman) are also offering free admission for families affected. The Sam Noble Museum is updating their Facebook page with information on how to help. The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum (OKC) is offering resources in dealing with the trauma from the disaster, especially the children. The University of Oklahoma (Norman; which has two museums associated with it) has offered major aid to families, has opened their dorms, and is feeding first responders. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is offering a free reception for the graduating students of the three Moore high schools. The Oklahoma Arts Council spent a day cleaning up a Moore cemetery. Our museum collected boxes to take to an employee that had his house ripped in half and other employees helped salvage what they could. The Mildred Westervelt Warner Transportation Museum in Tuscaloosa is planning to donate all proceeds from an upcoming lunch and learn event to the disaster relief efforts. The Oklahoma Museums Association (OMA) has been contacted by Amigos Disaster Response Helpline, CERF + Craft Emergency Relief Fund + Artists’ Emergency Resources, Society of American Archivist’s National Disaster Recovery Fund for Archives, American Association for State and Local History, and the Texas Association of Museums. Many other museums are also helping out in some way and I apologize if I left anyone off this brief list – it was mostly generated from my emails and social media. All of the above museums can be found on Facebook. Please “like” the pages to keep updated.

For more information about what is going on, here are some helpful links. It is in no way completely comprehensive:

For Oklahoma museums:

• Oklahoma Museums Association (OMA)
• OMA emergency links
• OMA Disaster Response Team contact information

For Disaster Recovery (non museum related):

• Up-to-date information and resources
• KFOR news channel link for ways to help

If you know any people in central Oklahoma and want to check their status (since communication is spotty at best), check with the Red Cross site at www.safeandwell.org

There are LOTS of Facebook pages set up to identify animals, documents/photos, and personal items from the tornadoes and reunite these items with their owners. TONS of local businesses, churches, etc. are serving as collection points and staging grounds. Lots of local business are donating food and proceeds from sales.

Probably more than you wanted to know – but it’s what we’re dealing with right now.

Prayers and positive thoughts are truly appreciated here in Oklahoma!

Karen Whitecotton is the Curator of Collections/Art at the Oklahoma History Center. She is also a Board Member of  the Oklahoma  Museums Association and a member of the Association’s Disaster Response Team.

Visit WMA’s Booth at AAM 2013

The Western Museums Association (WMA) is going to the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) 2013 Annual Meeting in Baltimore! If you are there, stop by booth #1231, meet our Executive Director Jason B. Jones, view the Preliminary Program and learn more about the WMA 2013 Annual Meeting, and get some great giveaways from Salt Lake City museums!

If you’re unable to attend AAM 2013, follow us on Twitter as we live tweet throughout the entire meeting.

Thank you to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Church History Museum, and the Park City Museum for providing us giveaways for our booth!

We’re looking forward to seeing you in Baltimore!

Member Spotlight: USS Hornet Museum

Every workday, Maureen Bourbin, Director of Collections and Exhibits, steps all over her museum’s most important artifact. Her office is on the second deck of the USS Hornet, in what used to be the ship’s TV station room. As one of only five aircraft carrier museums in the country, this museum is its own biggest and most important object.

The entire collection is housed on the ship as well. Staff are constantly climbing up and down ship ladders, and any objects moved in or out of storage must be carried on those ladders. Even emptying a humidifier tray is a balancing act.

But for Maureen, challenges such as these are part of the unique experience of working on the USS Hornet. This was the ship that, in 1969, went to meet the Apollo 11 astronauts when they landed in the ocean after taking humankind’s first steps on the moon. One of Maureen’s favorite artifacts is an original Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) installed on the aircraft carrier’s hangar deck. Sleek like an Airstream trailer, it is very similar to the MQF that quarantined the Apollo 11 astronauts on board the USS Hornet until NASA scientists were sure they were clean of any dangerous lunar germs that might contaminate Earth.

The USS Hornet Museum is located in Alameda, California, and is an Institutional Member at the Western Museums Association. The Museum works to preserve and honor the legacy ship itself—a national historic landmark—and its role in naval aviation, United States’ defense, the Apollo Program and exploration of space. In addition to the MQF and the ship itself, there is also a Flight Avionics Flight Simulator, other temporary exhibits, as well as community events.

Museum Archives and Resource Sharing

By Melissa Bowling

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) Museum Archives Section Working Group has been developing an online tool for the museum archives community to aid in the sharing of resources across institutions. Currently, the Working Group is gathering examples of forms, policies, and procedures to populate this online resource. You can view the resources that were gathered last year here.

At this time, the Working Group is trying to improve and expand this online resource to make it more useful to the museum archivist community. Based on a survey completed by Museum Archives Section members, as well as evaluative work, the Working Group has created a list of specific policies, procedures, and forms that it is trying to collect for it’s online resource. Please refer to the more detailed list, here, at the bottom of this post (here will be hyperlinked with an anchored link to the list). It is important to the Museum Archives Section Working Group that the resources selected for sharing represent different types of museums from many regions.

Once these documents are gathered, the Working Group will select examples of best practices to upload those to the SAA standards portal, as well as the Museum Archives website. All documents uploaded to the portal will be available to the public. Please note that not all of the documents that are collected will be uploaded to our site – the Working Group will be selecting diverse examples to share online.

The SAA Museum Archives Section would like to thank you in advance for your willingness to help build this valuable resource for the museum archives community.

Using the subject heading, “Museum Archives Resource Sharing,” please email submissions to melissa.bowling@metmuseum.org .

Requested Submission Documents:

• Social media policies
• Confidentiality or restriction policies
• Reader registration forms from small museums
• Collection development policies that discuss cooperative collecting
• Records management policies or manuals from non-art museums
• Records retention schedules from a public university museum
• Electronic records policies
• Electronic record retention schedules
• Mission statements or statements of purpose for non-art museums
• Preservation policies covering physical materials
• Preservation policies covering digital materials
• Processing manuals
• Standard series examples
• Consortium policies or agreements
• Space planning documents
• Disaster plans or plan sections covering digital assets
• Loan policies and forms
• Repository overviews or descriptions
• Assistant Archivist job descriptions or other job descriptions
• Oral history release agreements
• Access policies
• Digital asset management policies

2012-2013 Museum Archives Section Working Group: Barbara Austen, Pam Spriester Bell, Melissa Bowling, Rachel Chatalbash, Ryan Evans, Caroline LeFevre, Susan Miller, Dawn Sueoka, Lindsay Turley, Jennifer Whitlock, Brian Wilson

The CAFAM Granny-Squares Project, Los Angeles

By Renee Montgomery

On May 25, 2013 the three-story façade of the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), will be covered by a colossal handmade quilt comprised of thousands of “granny squares” – each individually crocheted by amateur crafters from around the world. A public art installation conceived by the group Yarn Bombing Los Angeles (YBLA) working with the CAFAM, this huge project was conceived to unite the craft community traditionally denied access to museum representation. YBLA is a collective of ‘guerrilla knitters’ staging public installations and performances since 2010. When YBLA put out the call for people to create and contribute a crocheted square for the CAFAM Granny-Squared project, never did they anticipate the massive response – 18,000 of the five-inch crocheted squares arrived over a five-month period from 50 states and 25 countries! The people donating the squares are as diverse as could be, as YBLA “Core Member” Arzu Arda Kosar explained, “We received crocheted granny squares by high-schoolers interested in the ‘handmade’ in the digital age, from seasoned crafters who have been crocheting for decades, and from others who learned to crochet just to participate in this project.” Most people submitted one piece for the project, but 50 people created over 100 squares each, with two individuals coming up with 600 pieces each. According to Kosar, “The overwhelming response to the project turned it into an organism of its own. Opening the packages, documenting and registering each square in a database, posting images on social media, sorting and storing material, and corresponding with participants online and in person became an intense full time job.”

Also developing an unexpected complexity was the fabrication and mounting of the huge quilt on the three-story façade along Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles (LA). The group originally planned to informally mount the squares onto existing hooks and protrusions from the building, with the attitude that, if the City forced the Museum to remove the crochet, this set-back would be considered part of the performance aspect of the work. However YBLA and CAFAM soon developed such a commitment to the 500 dedicated granny square donors that it became evident they would have to take the installation of the project on the building to a more professional level. Kosar explained about the extent some of the crafters had gone to donate squares: because mail from Iran is sanctioned the thirteen granny squares created by ten people in Shiraz got to the US only through a complicated exchange (through non-sanctioned locations) of hands, between suitcases, and friends of friends; a neurologist in rural Turkey had integrated the crochet project into her patients’ physical therapy; and instructors at LA’s Braille Institute had guided the hands of their visually impaired students so they could also participate. With 18,000 granny squares representing every possible worldwide story, YBLA began scrambling to raise funds to properly mount the oversized quilt per LA City building, safety and fire standards – hiring a licensed contractor and structural engineer to develop an armature to properly support the three-story afghan and provide fire retardant covering. YBLA members produced a short promotional video, successfully launched a USA projects campaign, applied for grants, and even took on some part-time jobs themselves.

When the installation is removed on July 1st, the huge quilt will be disassembled into smaller blankets for donation to the homeless residents of LA’s Skid Row.

Any WMA followers interested in helping stitch together the granny squares into the massive afghan will have the last opportunity on May 18, 2013 at CAFAM http://www.cafam.org/education.html.

Submitted by Guest Blogger, Renee Montgomery, Assistant Director, Insurance and Risk Management, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

A New Community for Museum Cataloging

Nomenclature 3.0 for Museum Cataloging is a structured and controlled list of object terms organized in a hierarchical classification system. It provides a way to index and catalog collections of human-made artifacts based on their function. A museum standard for over 30 years, the third edition of Nomenclature, produced in 2010, includes over 5,000 new object terms. More importantly, the lexicon has been improved and expanded, grouping similar object terms and offering increased levels of naming. These enhancements help catalogers determine the best term quickly and accurately.

 

How Can a Museum Adapt Nomenclature 3.0 to Suit its Own Needs?

While museums with specialized collections will appreciate the level of specificity they can achieve when cataloguing, not all institutions will require this level of naming. As Nomenclature points out, museums are encouraged to determine how far they want to go. Catalogers with a collection of carpenter’s planes may decide to use only the primary object term “Plane” or they may differentiate further between “Plane, Leveling” and “Plane, Grooving.”

The lexicon does not include all possible names for all possible museum artifacts. Rather than clutter Nomenclature 3.0 with multiple terms for musical instrument cases (e.g., “Case, Clarinet,” “Case, Trumpet,” “Case, Flute”), the generic primary object term “Case, Musical Instrument” is provided. Institutions with an extensive musical instrument collection can modify the lexicon by adding further specialized instrument cases as secondary terms under the generic primary term.

As long as new terms are added within the Nomenclature 3.0 framework, the reasons for adding the terms are documented, and the additions are made after careful consideration, the lexicon will function properly. When adding terms, it’s best to refer to the definitions given for the classifications and sub-classifications and to review existing object terms carefully to determine if any of them qualify as a broader term for the term to be added by the institution.

 

How Can You Find out More about Nomenclature 3.0?

As a way to introduce Nomenclature 3.0 to the museum public, the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) has established an online community for users of Nomenclature 3.0 for Museum Cataloging: http://aaslhcommunity.org/nomenclature/.

There, visitors can find a tutorial explaining the changes found in the third edition and keep up with the news on such issues as the lexicon’s adoption by software vendors, upcoming presentations, etc. Users can also query experts about the proper name for an object, propose new terms, and find recent updates to the lexicon.

Although many improvements have been made to meet the needs of its users and to reflect changing museum standards, Nomenclature will always be a work in progress. It is hoped that this new edition helps museums improve their data management and provides a firm foundation upon which future editions will be based.

The AASLH’s The Nomenclature Committee also invites museum cataloguers to participate in its Nomenclature Future Updates Survey. Your input is necessary to ensure that the Committee has the necessary input from users in the field.

Program Perspectives I: Get Ready for WMA 2013

By Steve Comba

With Registration now open for the Western Museums Association (WMA) 2013 Annual Meeting, we thought you might also want access to the Preliminary Program. The WMA Program Committee has been deciding on and preparing for the WMA 2013 sessions since January. Let me explain…

POUNDCAKEFRENCHFRIES

It was 9 degrees in Salt Lake, maybe, felt much colder,

Wintery view from the hotel

when 20 brave-hearted souls waded strong-coffee bolder.
They had 75 session proposals, all worthy of note,
sequestered themselves like castaways on a boat.

‘Twas nearly 10 hours of work, till day one was done,
and not a single person faded, no one had run.
Round the table sat a symphony of good-humored pros
from just about every imaginable station within the museum, I suppose.

We called ourselves “shepherds,” because of our action
to make each proposal succeed and gain traction.
Weighed options, added input, then watched the clock
as we gave each session our best, and boy, can we talk.

Imagine if you will, a sort of “Roundtable”
where, instead of landed gentry, sat real people, no fable.
Each opinion well versed and equally respected
at the end of the day, the votes were collected.

Using terms like “gap filling” and “session tracking,”
the Program Committee intends that no one find lacking,
a reason to learn or to connect with the like-minded,
or to explore some new place, go out, be far-sighted.

We met again, this time much less shivered
to dig through our work, a Program delivered.
Striving for balance, for clarity, and depth,
we hope our many members appreciate the breadth.

On a personal note, it has been such a pleasure
to sit round that table of so many of great measure.
Meals and drinks, filled with pints of mirth and merry
in a town like SLC where the opportunities for much never vary.

So to Art, Anne and Carrie, Clare and Irene,
working with you has been supreme.
To James and Jennifer, Jerry and Keni,
your diligence and concern will benefit many.
With Kurt, and Lorie, Louise (who will lead),
we crafted a program and did a good deed.
Margaret and Moya, Nathan and Paul,
were like long lost friends, who were not lost at all.
Sarah and Sean completed the table
where I sat with Steve Olsen, a man far more able.
Jason arranged us, made us all keep on time,
and even allowed me to publish this rhyme.

So when you see those colored ribbons attached to a name,
remember to say hello, because we’re all the same.
Committed to sharing in order to crack wise
just don’t ask what I mean by poundcakefrenchfries.

The Program Committee chose 50 sessions that are grouped into tracks including, business, careerpath/leadership, collections, visitor experience, technology, and community engagement. And like many of our roles at our institutions, these session tracks overlap. Read the WMA 2013 Preliminary Program now!

On behalf of the Program Committee, we look forward to seeing you in Salt Lake City for WMA 2013. Early Bird registration is now open until July 31, 2013. REGISTER now and save!

Steve Comba is a WMA Board member and the Co-Chair of the Western Museums Association’s 2013 Program Committee. He is also the Assistant Director/Registrar of Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont, California.