From catalogue cards to collections online

At the last bi-monthly meeting of the Ashburton Museum & Historical Society (AMHS), on Sunday 5 March, we celebrated the launch of Whakatere Heritage Collections Online, a new online collections research website.
Currently, the website hosts over 1,000 photograph records from the AMHS’ collection, and several dozen references to archival material from the Ashburton District Council’s archive collection. More records are gradually being prepared for online access, including archives, photographs, and object records.
All of this would not have been possible without much hard work having been done by previous Museum staff and AMHS members. The cataloguing system we use to keep records of our collections today is the product of many years of hard work and iteration on previous systems. It all started when former Museum curator Rita Wright saw the need for a proper system of organisation for the Historical Society’s collection, which she began tackling in the late 1980s.
A mammoth task ahead
When Rita began cataloguing and organising the collection around 1985, she was faced with a job that would overwhelm most people. At this time, the Museum was based in the former Ashburton Technical School building on Cameron Street. The building had an ample exhibition space, but storage conditions in the back rooms were less than ideal. By this point, the Society had collected a great number of objects, including historical furniture, clothing, tools, and equipment, as well as archives and photographs. Items were piled on top of each other, seemingly at random, and there was no recordkeeping system beyond the Museum’s accession books.
These hardback exercise books, which are still sometimes used today for confirming details, include the names of donors, brief descriptions of items, donation dates, and each entry has a sequential identification number. The Museum still uses an accession book, alongside our digital system, but back then the books were the only record of the collection.
This could not be considered a proper ‘catalogue’, as there was no way to find a specific item other than to go through the accession books line-by-line until you found what you were looking for.
Imposing order
Rita used information from the accession books to form the basis of her catalogue records, which took the form of library-style catalogue cards. She used an ‘Imperial’ typewriter from the Society’s collection for this purpose. Rita was supported by Canterbury Museum Liaison Officer Lynda Wallace (now at Akaroa Museum), who helped Rita to attend museum workshops and courses. From 1989 – 1995, Lynda travelled around the South Island, helping small museums with training, information, and essential resources to enhance their practice and get a handle on their collections. Lynda helped Rita to attend museum workshops and cources, and provided her with useful literature, including copies of information from the seminal resource Nomenclature for Museum Cataloguing by Robert Chenhall.
Rita was also supported by Margaret Bean, who joined the Historical Society and began working on the catalogue in 1991. From this point, the work was split down the middle: Margaret worked on the archives, or anything that was on paper, and Rita worked on the objects in the collection. Through the efforts of Rita and Margaret, and with Lynda’s professional support, an organised and easy-to-use card catalogue system was devised that formed the basis of our current digital system.
Digital evolution
In the early 2000s, the Ashburton Museum purchased the PastPerfect museum collection management software. This allowed staff and volunteers to catalogue and keep track of the AMHS’ collection digitally, and over time the information recorded on Rita and Margaret’s catalogue cards, and details from the accession books, were entered into the system.
Since then, our PastPerfect system has gone through countless upgrades and updates, including the PastPerfect Online upgrade which allowed us to launch Whakatere Heritage Collections Online. We are now able to share an ever-increasing amount of information about our collection, and showcase the hard work of our staff and volunteers, past and present, with the whole world online. You can browse Whakatere Heritage Collections Online right now by going to whakatereheritage.pastperfectonline.com.
By Connor Lysaght