Collections care terms can be utterly confusing, even among trained museum professionals. A term a registrar may use could be completely different from a director or an art preparator, and may not ultimately have detrimental outcomes for the misused term. But misusing the terms conservation, preservation, or restoration could leave your collections items or personal artifacts in the wrong hands for care.
What is Conservation?
Conservation encompasses all the actions taken toward the long-term care of cultural heritage. Activities include examination, […]
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Preventive Conservation: Preserving Entire Collections for the Long Term
Have you ever heard the saying ”an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.?” A truer saying couldn’t be more appropriate for the preservation and care of collections. Spending funds and energy proactively on preventive care is the most efficient way to preserve an entire collection for the long term, rather than reacting and treating damage that has already occurred to an individual object. Any type of action that can be implemented to mitigate the agents of deterioration—physical […]
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To Glove or Not to Glove: Wearing Gloves for Collections
In the very few movies that have depicted museum staff, the characters have usually worn little white cotton gloves when handling precious collections items (for example, 2004’s National Treasure, where an archivist helps protect the Declaration of Independence from being stolen). When I tell people I work in a museum, they almost always mention or ask about the white cotton gloves. But is that a realistic depiction of how actual museum staff handle collections?
Are gloves necessary for handling collections?
As part […]
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Hazardous Materials in Collections
As an extremely active collecting museum, The Strong National Museum of Play is home to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of historical materials related to play. While it’s our mission to collect and preserve artifacts, sometimes the items we collect have the potential to cause harm, whether that’s from the inherent materials that were used during production, materials that were added to the artifact later, or artifacts that pose risks from handling. While some obvious collection items that […]
Simulation, Photography, and Flâneurie In Video Games
The once pejorative term “walking simulator” was often deployed to single out video games that bucked the trend of delivering a fast-paced, action-packed, adrenaline-pumping experience with clear-cut rules and goals and instead opted for making video games organized by a thin set of rules and optional tasks in favor of open-ended wandering and exploration. These days, walking simulators show promise as they rise in popularity, signaling an important shift in interest among developers and gamers alike toward nuance, discovery, and […]
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Digging for GEM icons in an Atari ST Floppy Disk
In 2018, The Strong embarked on a project to digitize floppy disks using a device called the Kryoflux to capture the data stored on 3.5- and 5.25-inch floppy disks. Reading a floppy disk in the 21st century was the first step necessary to preserve hundreds of floppy disks in The Strong’s archival collections. In some cases, the Kryoflux was a useful tool to capture old games and development materials but, with more than 1,500 floppy disk images in […]
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Preserving Rubber Toys
Rubber has been used to play ball since the first Mesoamerican ball games of the Olmec people began around 3,000 years ago. The ball courts used for that game can be visited at Tulum, Ek Balam, and Coba in Mexico. The Olmec discovered that latex from a rubber tree could be mixed with juice from a species of morning glory to produce a useable rubber. The rubber was formed into hollow and solid balls for the ancient game, but very […]
What’s Up with U-Matic?
In the beginning (or at least in the late 19th century), there was film. Capturing moving images and playing them back for astonished audiences at the cinema more than a century ago was magical. Though many people are still familiar with film, which has endured as a medium despite changing technologies, there are plenty of moving image formats which have been rendered obsolete over time and have found their way into the holdings of numerous libraries, archives, and museums.
I previously […]
A Laboratory for Video Game Preservation
In 2006, when we began our efforts at The Strong to preserve the history of video games, we knew we were onto an important subject, but we did not truly foresee the vast array of challenges that we would face in preserving video games. Over the years as we founded the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) and grew our collection to more than 60,000 video games and related objects we’ve learned quite a bit about how […]
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