Greetings, Museum Forum gurus - I am working with a small, local historical society (and historic house museum) adopting PastPerfect. We will be assigning the collection's first accession numbers. Luckily, we have dates the objects entered the collection, but the existing numbering system does not give a clue to object category or type.
In a previous museum, we had an existing (legacy) object ID numbering system which we used much more than accession numbers for a variety of reasons I won't go into here. However, the object ID numbers provided clues as to what type of object you were looking for (painting, furniture, textile, etc.) That system had been established by the museum's first curator, Henry Watson Kent (who would go on to be the first librarian at the Met and to help establish its American Wing). He'd been trained by Melvil Dewey (at Columbia's School of Library Economy), so I'm guessing his numbering system was based on that. It went something like this; paintings' prefix was 180.; furniture, 90.; costumes/attire 100. (as I recall).
My question is does this sound familiar to anyone? I've scoured the web and can find nothing referring to such a system. Once we became familiar with it at my old shop, it was quite useful, so I'm considering recommending we use it (or similar) at the historical society for the object ID field in PastPerfect. We would, of course, assign accession numbers and retain the "old number" in that field... Clearly, we would still use standard nomenclature and record the appropriate object name, description, dims, etc., etc.
Any thoughts out there in the museoiverse? Thank you!