9.4: Curation - Access to Information

Many collectors object to archaeologists and conservation professionals criticising the notion of a "private collection", saying that the material in their own personal portable antiquities collection is available to bona fide researchers for study. While this is laudable, it should not be imagined that this is an ideal situation for any researcher. Even if an object has been recorded in a public database like the PAS, there is no mechanism to follow the movement of objects between various ephemeral private collections after it leaves the collection of the finder. If they are not accompanied by their own documentation, even objects that had been shown to archaeologists and recorded a decade or more earlier are in effect later totally lost to science. Even if a few decades from now a coin or brooch surfaces anonymously, it will be difficult to relate it to one of the mass of records of similar-looking objects in archived archaeological records. 

 Many artefacts in private collections are simply currently inaccessible to researchers for the very reason that nobody knows what a given collector has. Even in the case that a finder showed the artefact to archaeologists who recorded it and its current whereabouts in a private collection are known, there may subsequently be only limited access to the material. Kershaw notes (2013: 17) a problem with this situation. The identification and classification (or reclassification) of artefacts is therefore:
heavily reliant on images and written accounts produced by others, which can vary in quality and detail. This has clear implications for the ability of this study to identify and classify relevant artefacts and to assess more subtle features which may be revealed only through close, first-hand study, such as design irregularities, object wear and surface treatment.
Obviously, there are serious flaws in this as a system of curation of archaeological information.

 Bibliography:
Kershaw, Jane 2013, Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England’. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 

Vignette: Mike44nh

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