Itchy Legs After Pedicure

Synthesis midterm

The situation

In a round of institutional collections around the scientists and their practices mirror, two day workshops have already taken place. Science bundles National Archives and National Museum of Natural History in October and Sort / Ranger: dialectic of order and disorder in the scientific collections s National Museum of Archaeology. Three more are coming in the first half of 2011.

This initial step and prerequisite for any larger project allows us to formulate our questions about the role of collections and archives in scientific work. We recall here the ins and outs. This action plan summarizes the actions of everyone. His ambition is just align our thinking for an action plan.

The removal and redevelopment past and future (ATP, Museum of Man, National Archives, Herbarium, Paleontology, MAN) note that deposits are fragile and collections more. While their story is not entirely written, that their operation is still ongoing, organization and integrity of archives and artifacts are challenged at the risk of upsetting a fragile balance. Indeed, funds and collections do not accumulate, but are integrated through a process of "layering" dynamic. We must here remember that any scientific collection has its own history. Since a collection is a set that comes into contact with each of its components (the parts themselves, documentation, collectors, strategy of "gathering", etc..) Grasp the logic of storage and organization since its origin constitution is part of his understanding, so its use. Skip production conditions Historic Collections denies the specificity Collection and erase some of its scientific interest. This ignorance, often due to lack of resources, or practice and the development of the same collection, jeopardizes the full use of the fund collection. That is what, ultimately obscures and confuses the reading of the internal systems of collection, the false diagnoses on the relevance of their organization and sometimes leads to sweeping reforms. What to do in broad strokes a story collections over the past two centuries, we can only note that if a museum has, it can also destroy.

General approach:

1. Clarifying the relationship of research work with the funds and collections.

This is question the practice of setting up and operating collections and archives, to the extent they are material to think with and through them. How scientific work is organized with the collections and archives? There is often a lack of reflexivity and a deletion of the material dimension of work that contributes to scientific production, however we will try to fill.

Objectification of our respective practices related to collections and archives can switch from a registry of procedures (know-how) to register declarative (telling). In speaking, the discourse is constructed in this way, the experience becomes knowledge in enabling it into words. Thus, in explaining the implicit, our experiments set speeches are exchanged through these exchanges and retrace our steps. To this end, the video tool described in our actions that call a second time to comment and expose them to our working group.

2. Enter which falls in the funds and collections.

Literally "dissect", drawing on concrete examples, how organized stages of processing equipment and intellectual reserves of funds and collections, based on (or not) of work TODAY 'hui but also the very history of the collections.

• Explore the tension between classifying and storing on multiple grounds (archive, library, science museum)
• Addressing the disjunction between archives and collections

- > This is to reconstruct an administration of things, practices and actions raised in the classification logic and materiality / physical aspects of storage.

For this, we must examine the "intermediaries" that define the key between systems and Ranger Sort:

• Indexing collections of funds and inventory, file, directory, catalog, label
• Supports hardware: cabinet, window, drawer, box, bay, bin, carton, bundle, file
• Provide an overview of the scientific and cultural redevelopment of major scientific and historical collections from the National Archives, MNHN, the MAN, the HPI and possibly the Museum of Man.

From these initial questions about the collections, funding and research, we would have appraised systems (some already existing) that would connect in a kind of "meta-network" data we produce all and that overlapping, help restore meaning (or the original meaning) to the various "collections" whatever their respective natures.

One goal would be in a future yet to be determined to build a relational database, locating in time and space people and objects. This meta-tool in the form of a geographic information system, and historical prosopographic meet our needs identification in the current state of tools remain unanswered. We would have to draw it in the context of a multiyear research project of type ANR.

Comments are open and expected.