In 1881 the US National Museum in Washington DC (today known as the Art and Industries Building in the Smithsonian Museum<\/a>) opened and, for the first time in history, it included among its staff what was called a \u201cRegistry office\u201d. Its co-director G. Brown Goode firmly defended the creation of a system of universal and standardized access to collections. In 1895 Brown Goode, heavily influenced by the South Kensington Museum in London (now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum), drafted a document, Principles of Museum Administration<\/em><\/a>, in which he laid the foundations that were to underpin the subsequent philosophy with regard to collections management, based on the premise that the<\/strong> value of a collection depends to a very large extent on the accuracy and level of introduction of the documentary history of all the objects<\/strong> it contains. Therefore, a specimen in a collection without a corpus of documents and an inventory with which to be associated is a virtually worthless object, seeing as it is not accessible to be visited or studied. It is unlisted, unknown and, when all is said and done, lost.<\/p>\n The Museu Nacional\u2019s painting storage rooms. Photo: Marta M\u00e9rida<\/p><\/div>\n In the early twentieth century, helped by the growth of communications, American and European museums began to move collections to public exhibitions and events. At the same time, museum workers began to devise standardized systems for inventorying, documenting and arranging their collections in order to have them controlled and make them universally accessible.<\/p>\n The initiative was taken by the science and natural history museums, and they were followed by museums of all kinds until, in the 1910s, the \u201cRegistry\u201d started to become a fundamental competence of a museum\u2019s basic work. The Metropolitan Museum, in the April 1907 Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mentions that since 1905 it has had a Registrar\u2019s Office, and it establishes that \u201call the art objects that are admitted through donation, purchase or loan, are received by the Registrar\u2019s Office. If they are rejected, they are returned to the owner by the same unit or department. After the museum\u2019s Board of Directors has accepted an object, the Registrar will immediately give it a number, enter it in the collections inventory book, and send it to the photographer\u2019s studio so that he may photograph and label it.\u201d<\/p>\n The courier work: a task often shared between the Registrars and the Curators\u2013restorers. Photo:\u00a0Maria Jes\u00fas Cabedo<\/p><\/div>\n Around the same time, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston<\/a> established the functions of its Registry staff: to control the logistics of works, customs formalities, the management of loans and deposits, and the control of collections inventories, the photographic register and the correct storage of objects.<\/p>\n Having laid these first foundations of the profession, the need to standardize protocols and bring into line the technical processes<\/strong> soon became clear. The first attempt came in 1906 with the creation of the American Association of Museums (AAM), which drew up the first standardization protocols at its famous meetings in 1907. For the first 50 years, this association worked to establish standards and to introduce the rules for collections management. The first AAM ethics code, the Code of Ethics for Museum Workers<\/em>, appeared in 1925.<\/p>\n The 1950s were crucial for the development of the standards of the profession. The discussions among collections management staff noted down at several meetings culminated with the publication in 1958 of Museum Registration Methods<\/em>, the reference manual for officers in the sector. From 1968 to 2011 it was revised, updated and reissued, and it is now in its fifth edition<\/a>.<\/p>\n Museum Registration Methods 5th edition. Basic manual of the collection Registrar<\/p><\/div>\n The boom in this profession in the USA was due to the phenomenon of authorizations that American museums experienced in the 1960s as a result of the Belmont Report on the state of American museums, which had been commissioned by the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, requested by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1976.<\/p>\n Many American museums aspiring to receive federal funding realized that the profession needed an authorization system to reach the standard of quality in Museum Administration. This process led, first, to the standardized professionalization of registrars and curators and, second, to the rapid proliferation of different specific university degrees in Collections Management. It is enough to list a few of them to give us an idea of the dimension that the profession reached in the 1970s in America: the Cooperstown Graduate Program (from 1964), the University of Delaware\u2019s Museum Studies Program (from 1972), the JFK University Program in San Francisco (from 1974), and the George Washington University Museum Program (from 1976). A report similar to Belmont was drafted in France some years later: the Richer Report (2003), which tackled the problem of collections management.<\/p>\n The Museu Nacional\u2019s stone sculpture storage room. Photo: Marta M\u00e9rida<\/p><\/div>\n In Europe the first registrars and collections management experts date from the late 1970s. <\/strong>The first registrars that we know of in museum management systems are those of the National Gallery<\/a>, which has had a Registry Department since 1977, the National Portrait Gallery<\/a>, in 1978, and the Tate Gallery<\/a>, in 1979.<\/p>\n In Spain, training in this professional profile did not appear until the late 1980s, with the arrival of renewals, enlargements and openings of new museums. The first registrar is recorded in 1986 and the first museum to introduce it was the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno<\/a> (IVAM), then directed by Tom\u00e1s Llorens. Llorens had appointed Vicente Todol\u00ed, who had graduated in Museum Studies in the USA, to the curatorial department. Todol\u00ed created the first Registry and Collections Management Department in a Spanish museum and he invited Corinne Diserens and Elizabeth Carpenter to train the staff of the recently created Collections Department, following the methodology of the register in American museums.<\/p>\n Later, and due to the lack of training platforms in Spain, the Registry staff of the IVAM moved to the Registrar\u2019s departments of the MoMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim in New York to complete their training. The office of the Registrar had come into being in Spain, and in the organizational structure it was on the same level as the Restoration and Conservation departments.<\/p>\n Gradually, other Spanish museums incorporated the figure of the collections management officer: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda<\/a>, Thyssen Bornemisza<\/a> or the case of the Museo del Prado<\/a> which, although it had had a Documentation Service since 1985, the office of registrar was not mentioned in its organizational structure until 1991.<\/p>\n In Catalonia, the profession developed in the late 1980s and it received a great boost after the 1992 Olympic Games thanks to the many temporary exhibitions that were organized<\/strong> and to the appearance of new museums: the Museu d\u2019Art Contemporani (MACBA)<\/a>, the Centre de Cultura Contempor\u00e1nea de Barcelona (CCCB)<\/a>, the Fundaci\u00f3 T\u00e0pies<\/a>, la Fundaci\u00f3 Mir\u00f3<\/a> or the redesigned rooms in the Museu Nacional d\u2019Art de Catalunya<\/a>. Although other museums already had documentation departments, they all incorporated the standards of the Registry, on some occasions as a specific Registry and Collections Management Department and, on others, combining it with exhibition coordination.<\/p>\n Along with the creation of new museums and institutions, the network of national, regional and local museums was set up in Catalonia. Although the institutions\u2019 awareness of the need for these professionals has increased in line with the volume of objects loaned and the movement of artistic assets, the same cannot be said as regards their continual training or the legislation, still subject to the Llei de Museus 17\/1990, of 2 November, or the Llei de Patrimoni Cultural Catal\u00e0 9\/1993, of 30 September. There are platforms from which Registry staff can bring their standards of quality up to date. One of the most active is the European Registrars Conference, which was set up in 1998.<\/p>\n Old inventory files; today they\u2019re replaced by software specialized in documentation of collections. Photo: Wikipedia<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n There are two ways of understanding what in the English-speaking world is known as Collections Management:<\/p>\n Given the registrar\u2019s specialization in fields like transportation, insurance or the upkeep of collections, in America the registrar works independently of the curator or conservator, and his duties revolve around a core mission: registration and keeping inventories.<\/p>\n This function is defined in the Code of Ethics for Registrars, drawn up in 1984 by the Registrars Committee, at the AAM, and, in Great Britain, by article 2 of the founding charter<\/a> of the United Kingdom Registrars Group (UKRG) in 1992, revised in 2014. Both documents establish that this officer\u2019s core mission is dominated by eminently logistical tasks, although duties referring to acquisitions policies and admissions management (donations, deposits, purchases, legacies, and so on) are also included.<\/p>\n When an object joins, the implementation of the technical file is done by the Registrar. Photo: Bark Frameworks<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n They are also responsible for managing loans, transportation, packaging (collaborating closely with Preventive Conservation), storage, customs formalities and insurance. They have to be specialized in risk management and logistics and one of their greatest responsibilities is the creation and management of the legal documentation of collections, guaranteeing the safety of objects, insuring their movements, organizing transportation and verifying inventories.<\/p>\n The European model differs from the Anglo-American one. It is characterized by the dominant figure of the heritage conservator or collections curator, who, moreover, supervises the inventorying of collections, documents them and manages lending them for exhibition projects that may request them. The collections registry department at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris was set up in 1977 according to this model, and it was subsequently copied by the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay<\/a> and others. Gradually, the French model of the registrar \u2013 although maintaining its strong curatorial links \u2013 has leant towards loans management and its risks, associated with the circulation of works of art and assets of patrimonial interest, and it has become specialized in two major areas of responsibility: organizing or supervising the logistics of collections in the technical, administrative and financial spheres, and assessing the risks associated with transporting cultural assets through the application of preventive conservation measures, security and insurance.<\/p>\n Digital technology is an essential tool for the registrar of the collections. Photo: Marta M\u00e9rida<\/p><\/div>\n In Europe, the BIZOT group, Groupe international des organisateurs de grandes expositions<\/em>, of which this museum is a member, is a discussion forum for major museum directors for standardizing and improving their loans and exhibitions management policies in Europe and the world. It has played a very important part in the definition of the registrar\u2019s duties. Since 1992 it has promoted the standardization of professional practice.<\/p>\n The other European platform par excellence for the normalization and professionalization of the registrar is ICOM (International Council of Museums),<\/a> which drafted a report on loans management policy that corresponds to the Council of Europe\u2019s Resolution 13839\/04 for the mobility of collections.<\/p>\n Currently the British and French models are at the forefront of a new concept of registrar looking after collections management. Other countries, especially Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Austria, have been updating their standards and they have adapted them to the idiosyncrasy of their countries (for example, in Italy the profession revolves around loans management \u2013 the famous Ufficio prestiti<\/em>). Nowadays, the profession is focusing on a profile of an officer qualified to handle risk management, as we learn from the different reports that have been drafted since 1998 at the biennial meetings of the European Registrars Conference (ERC):<\/p>\n From the working dynamics of the different platforms of professionalization that we have described, one learns of the trend in recent years towards the centralization of the registrar\u2019s duties in three major categories or competences: technology, scientific and administrative. The current figure of the registrar, in both Europe and in the English-speaking world, requires multidisciplinary knowledge and great versatility. It is a highly qualified professional profile that shares a professional curriculum with curators and with conservator-restorers.<\/p>\n Control process of loading and unloading and manipulation of art works. Photo: Silvia Tena<\/p><\/div>\n As Delsault-Lardy and Vassal pointed out, in \u201cActeurs et comp\u00e9tences\u201d (2000), \u201cregistrars and curator-conservators must work together [\u2026] and share the responsibility with respect to data gathering on works and their accessibility.\u201d In fact, this professional pairing has already become a general rule in Europe. The world of contemporary art is a clear example of the need for this pairing of the registrar and the curator. As Yvan Clouteau points out, the conservation conditions of modern works necessarily require shared knowledge in various fields, principally those of conservation, documentation, restoration and museum organization. Today the work of the registrar cannot be understood without the concept of task sharing as an organizational tool of all institutions with patrimonial responsibility.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/1744-181.jpg\")
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<\/a>The standardization of protocols, a necessity<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>What do Registry and Collections Management mean?<\/h3>\n
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The Anglo-American model<\/h4>\n
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<\/a>The European model<\/h4>\n
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Towards an emerging profession<\/h3>\n
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