Strategies for Effective Collections Management Work

Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Rachael Cristine Woody. My name is Bradley, and I will be your moderator for this webinar titled Strategies for Effective Collections Management Work.

Before we start, I would like to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions as well as knowledge management and library automation systems. Our brands include ArchivEra, Argus, Presto, and SydneyDigital.

Now I would like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Rachel Christine Woody. Rachel is the owner of Relicura and provides services to museums, libraries, and archives. She specializes in museum collections management systems, digitization technology, digital project management, and digital usership. During the course of her career, she has successfully launched multiple digital projects that include advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management systems. She is also a popular guest author for Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog and has provided us with many great webinars that are listed on our website, so please feel free to check those out after today’s session. Take it away, Rachel.

Great. Thank you so much, Bradley. Thank you to Lucidea for hosting us today, and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar. We are going to get into effective collections management work. I always enjoy this topic because it can be a great refresher for those of us who tend to get sort of stuck in our routine or who answer to our schedules that can very often get unwieldy with all of the different responsibilities we can have in our museums. So, I hope you find it as interesting and as helpful as I do and always good to periodically check-in on how we approach our work and how we can create times and systems to be the most effective with the little time that we have sometimes for this type of focused work.

So first, we’ll talk about challenges of effective collections management. They may seem obvious, but can be very helpful for our brains to see the challenges that we’re facing day to day because it can be helpful to spot, in future and hopefully help avoid some of the challenges and pitfalls to our work.

I’ll then talk about how to create time for collections management work, and it’ll be sort of a two part. So how to create time and then also how to protect time. So depending on your schedule and what it consists of or how it can tend to get cluttered up with tons of meetings and hardly time to do the actual work from the meetings, we’ll have two different approaches and strategies for you, to approach that.

Once we’ve carved out time and protected it, we’ll talk about how to batch collections management work. Batching is used very frequently in our line of work. You’re probably already very familiar with it. But just in case, we’ll do a little refresher on what it can look like, and I have some ideas for the types of our collections management work that lends itself to that batch approach.

And, of course, we’ll talk about leveraging the museum collections management system because, of course, our CMS comes with different tools and functionality that can lend itself to batch work or it can also be used to help support, through bulk actions, for example, of that sort of batch update or batch editing.

And then, at the very end, we’ll talk about how to prepare for your focused time that you have carved and protected out in your schedule so that you have everything you need to be the maximum effectiveness, but also maximum success when you do have these times for your focus work.

So first up, the challenges to effective collections management work. First of all, and usually is the case at least in my schedule, there are way too many meetings. This is especially true after the global pandemic where many of us have become adept and used to the stacking of Zoom meetings at the start of every hour, and it has gotten to the point where our days can be quite full between in person meetings and Zoom meetings in addition to the actual activities of our day to day work. Because, of course, as collections managers, our primary job is not necessarily to do meetings all day every day, and so we do need that time that’s separate from meetings.

Another challenge is just too many tasks. This is another very common thing for us as collections management workers, whether registrar, whether exhibit install, whatever your flavor of that collection stewardship. There’s often just way too many tasks in the day. We’re often doing a few different positions worth of work, especially in particularly challenging times or where there’s a loss of staff. So having too many things to do is also a bit of a barrier.

First of all, from just like a decision making perspective, but also from a focus and able to do things perspective.

Another challenge is interruptions, our type of work especially, as we interwork with other people, as there are things that we depend on from other people, in addition to just email, phone notifications, and things like that that can interrupt our day or derail us, especially when we’re attempting to do some of that deep focus work that collections management requires.

Another challenge is having no intentions set forth, which when you’re in the day to day of it, like, it can be very easy because we’ve not had time to actually take a moment to plan out our chunk of focused time to go into it with intention. And so while that is very natural to our our current state of work, it is something to be cognizant of, especially as you move into being more purposeful and in carving out and protecting time for this focused work.

And then final challenge that can occur is no preparation. And that is something to keep in mind as we plan for these types of periods of focused work.

Having both the intention and then the preparation of what needs to be in place so that when you sit down, when the clock starts on that focused time, you can hit the ground running. You have everything you need. You’ve answered all your questions.

The preparation has made it possible so you can just really dive in and focus on what you’re doing and get it done without then risking losing of momentum, interruptions, etcetera.

So how to create time for collections management work? This is incredibly important, especially if you’re looking at your schedule and week after week you see that you have like zero time.

Or what can often be worse is that you do have some time, but it’s like maybe an hour or two a day sandwiched in between meetings. And so it is not enough time and not enough protected or consistent time for you to actually capitalize on to do some of that deep focus collections management work.

So as you look at your schedule, we’re gonna need to make some changes or at least moving forward be intentional with what we’re accepting into our schedule.

The first thing I recommend is reviewing your calendar for the natural openings.

Typically, there is a cadence to the week, especially if you are in a traditional museum setting. That tends to be dictated about whether the doors are open to the public or not, what days the volunteers tend to be in more heavily than others, things like that that can make the nature of your work perhaps very heavy on Tuesday through Thursday. But perhaps Mondays and Fridays are a bit more quiet. There’s less meetings perhaps, less volunteers or people who need your time or attention.

And noticing those spots or those days where there’s a bit of a consistency in cadence or it’s a bit easier for you to open up your schedule or to put in some of that blocked focus time.

The next sort of tip is as you look at your schedule and because there’s often, for us maybe too many meetings that we’ve been committed to, doing an assessment and removal of meetings. This part can be a little tricky because, of course, it’s not necessarily always up to us which meetings we are required to attend.

But there are often some meetings that are perhaps more optional. Maybe there’s a different staff member that you can partner up with where maybe you alternate on who attends the, like, broader staff meeting, for example.

Maybe there’s committee work or optional volunteer type stuff that you have either been voluntold or you’ve committed to in the moment that maybe is not serving you anymore. And being able to start removing some of those things to create blocks of time to help build on your natural openings or if you had no openings then the creation of actual openings for you to do your actual job.

This may also for this one with the removal of meetings.

If there are meetings that you are committed to perhaps your boss has indicated that these are required there may be a way to approach those meetings in a more efficient manner. So for example, if you have like a one on one with your boss and maybe there’s a broader team meeting, for example, maybe you stack those meetings together in one afternoon so that you have bigger blocks of time on a different day. So there’s some flexibility of even if it’s not removing meetings, maybe being more effective in how you schedule or approach those meetings that could give you some of your time back.

And then moving some of those standing meetings. So in your day to day, if there’s typically weekly cadence of meetings or, for example, if if they’re random meetings that have nothing to do with each other, if you’re able to sort of align them and have, a meeting day, maybe Monday is is my always meetings day, but Tuesday and Wednesday are my focus days. So just approaching it differently, thinking about how you could be creative, how you stack those meetings together, how many standing meetings you’re a part of, and what days those occur on. So there’s quite a bit of things that you could tweak or adjust or try and creatively think about, and with you, your colleagues, and your boss of course to make some of that time.

So it’s one thing to create time it’s another thing to protect time. So as you have these pockets of time now so that you can do some of that focused work, you are going to need to be proactive in your protection of it. Because, of course, as we’ve become more available to people, especially virtually and as people have access to our calendars, it can be quite easy for people to put stuff on your schedule that is not necessarily something you’ve committed to or that isn’t optimal for your own schedule.

And, of course, when they see openings of time, people will think you’re available. They are not going to consider that perhaps this is time you’ve set aside for the actual doing of your job.

So as we think about these pockets of time and protecting them, having a designated, like block meeting for yourself or perhaps declaring that you have a no meeting day if that’s possible for you, making sure that you are assigning or prescribing the time, making sure that you’re communicating that can be very important and essentially establishing this is not free time. This is not time available for someone else to take up. This is time that you have designated for your work.

With that in mind, scheduling those focus blocks in advance can be critical, especially if your particular schedule tends to be a bit more varied and so that block of time or your no meeting day may actually look different from week to week. Having a scheduled chunk for yourself where it’s in your calendar, it’s blocked out, you are not shown as available can be very important. And especially if that changes as you go through week by week, blocking those out ahead of time at least by a few weeks can be very helpful to protect that time from getting snapped up.

Then consider the physical location of your work and this gets to the more in person and trying to sort of circumvent any sort of interruptions that may occur or any other sort of constraints or distractions of your time. So when you get into your focused time designated for work, maybe that is something that takes place not in your office. Maybe there’s a, designated quiet area. Maybe you’re actually in the stacks of the collections doing some of this work. So sometimes changing that physical location can help, avoid some of the pitfalls that can occur during or in around that time.

And then setting the tone.

As you become more intentional and proactive in establishing your time for this focused work as you work to protect it, communicating that and, helping to set expectations for what that means for you, but also what you hope that means for your colleagues as you work together. And, also, conversely, respecting their time. So being more aware that if you are seeing them working, this is perhaps not a great time for interruption, and that this is actually time to respect for their focus to time. So having that that sort of mutual respect and thoughtfulness and also being very communicative and consistent in your own practices can all help set the tone of this creation and protection of focused work.

So thinking about how to batch collections management work. So this will help in the preparation aspect that we’ll talk about and while our focus time doesn’t need to always be the most efficient or always include the concept of batch work, batch work does lend itself to these, pockets of focused time. And and if your brain is like mine, the more efficient you are, of the more points you get, at least for the dopamine in my head. So when we think about batching, what does that mean and what sort of work could be batched? Batch work is essentially anything we do that is either a series of similar tasks that we can put together and it’s a bit more repetitive but the efficacy of time saved in doing that same task, there’s benefits to be gained. Batchwork can also look like maybe it’s not the same repeated task but maybe it is a start to finish.

For example, cataloging an object you’re not necessarily filling in the geography for a whole bunch of objects that could be the first flavor of batch work but the second flavor could look like I am taking this object from beginning to end we are filling in all of the basic data today for this object.

So it’s the concept of what is the information that goes together, what are the activities or tasks that I need to do for this, and what is sort of the maximum efficacy of how I can approach it whether that is the same task repeatedly or a particular object or activity from beginning to end.

So why do the batch work? As we’ve mentioned, efficacy is a big one. There can be a concept or at least a feeling of time saved even maybe if the math doesn’t necessarily work out, especially as you start out. But it can also help just with brain fatigue. Once you get into something, especially an area of focused work, the amount of mental load can decrease as we get into that groove so to speak. So while there’s efficacy, there can be time gains, there can also be a lightening of that mental load.

And so there can be some very different types of benefits to you as a person but also to your work.

And then what makes sense to batch? So as you think about the two different flavors of batching if it’s the same task repeated this could very much be I am researching and looking at the accession files for provenance for this dozen objects. And so it’s those dozen objects, it’s all about provenance. Or the second flavor where it is taking perhaps one object and doing like a beginning to end type activity whether that’s cataloging basic data, whether that’s doing a condition report, something that has a beginning to end where you can then check it off the list type activity.

So as you think about those things, I’m sure you can think of several more ideas of how that might apply to your work. And I think you’ll find as I have collections management work is very, like, very applicable for this type of approach. So if this is something your brain appreciates, I think you’ll find several different dozen different ways, projects, activities that you could do and to have it packaged in this batch type approach.

Alright. Leveraging the collections management system for this type of work. So, of course, as collections managers, we are in the system quite a bit. We’re either creating the data or referencing the data or we’re augmenting the data.

And so with our collections management system and depending on what your system is, there is usually always a suite of tools or functionality where it can support that type of batched work or at the very least support that type of deep focused work.

So some examples of how CMS can help is addressing missing data using the CMS to help identify fields that are perhaps frequently empty but yet are critically important to the management or discovery of the collection item.

We can also use the system and leverage it to find data that needs to be removed. For example, perhaps there was data parked in a field for a particular project that is now done, no longer relevant for the object, so clearing some of that out.

We can also move data from one field to another. This can be very important, especially if you’ve been in the system for a long time or if there’s been staff transition or you’ve changed how you use the system. Moving data to different areas is very common and that can be done with the CMS help whether with some bulk updates or if you have access to import. So a few different options for your CMS there.

Another item is bulk updating vocabularies or exchanging one vocabulary for another. This is another great example of that perhaps it’s a repeated task but it’s in a very specific area of work and the CMS can be very helpful at doing that bulk approach and bulk, broadly applying that change to your data.

And then of course anything that can be exported and imported if your system supports that type of approach it can be incredibly helpful to export for example like your artist records that many artists are missing data or perhaps they need their names reformatted. And so having the, ability to export cleanup and then import can be also very helpful and easy to leverage for this sort of bulk approach and also area of deep focus. You wanna make sure that when you’re playing with your data that you you have the time and attention for it because it can be very easy to make a mistake which we of course don’t want to do and having that focused time that you’ve protected for this type of work is very important.

So how to prepare? So we talked about how to create the time, how to protect the time, how to approach it perhaps with batched work, how to leverage our collections management system to lend further power to our few areas of pockets of focus. And so now how to prepare for it. And so this is where we get into that intention and preparation. We wanna make sure that we’re going in with an idea of what we intend to do for our focused time.

And so especially if you’re one that needs to plan it out and protect it weeks in advance, perhaps each week at the beginning of the week, designate my four hours on Friday is going to be for the artist record cleanup. And so even prescribing it a theme or an intended topic to do can be incredibly helpful. It’s also required if you are then going to prepare for that time. So we know that whenever we are working on our collections, there’s often data we need to gather ahead of time.

We may need to go gather and access physical files. We may need to actually look at the object itself, for example. Maybe we need to research or pull something from the archives. So there’s a number of steps that we may be able to do or at least put into motion as we work our way towards that focused time so that everything is ready and we can hit the ground running.

So giving some specifics for you and, and taking this into especially your first few sessions of focused time as you sort of get your, your feet under you, so to speak, with this type of approach, I recommend having a clearly defined scope. So identifying that topic, but perhaps even identifying what that means. What are what’s the quantity? What’s the shape of it?

I think going at one step further, if you have that time to prepare intentionally selecting and listing the activities. So the scope may be artist records. You may further define it as artist records that relate to the ceramics collection.

You may then want to identify specifically it’s the artist records but it’s the dates that we need to make sure are correct.

With that in mind now that you’ve got the scope and the shape of it you can identify the end goal or what the deliverable looks like. So for you for the, ceramic artists, maybe there are several dozen of them. All several dozen of them will have updated dates after the end of my time on Friday, for example.

Then with these activities, with that deliverable in mind, what are the relevant workflows that you may need to use? This example with artist records, we know that we’re going to leverage the CMS and perhaps do an export import of this cleaned up data. So I know that I need to do a fresh export of the artist Friday morning. I need to then let people know not to change the artist records for the next two to four hours, and then I will change those records, update, and import them back in. So knowing what the workflows are in this case for that export and import process.

And with these activities with these workflows identified what are the instructions or reference material you may need. So if you’re newer for example to using your CMS and you’re newer to the export import capability, having a set of instructions in front of you can help ensure that one, everything goes smoothly and you can successfully import your new data back in. But two, help you save time and aggravation of maybe not quite knowing what to do, needing to seek out help, maybe you have to wait to hear back from somebody. So it can help ensure one it happened successfully but two that your time in general is successful and removing any sort of stressors or blockers that could impact the use of your time.

So in conclusion, we have covered the challenges that can pop up for us to effective collections management work. Quite a bit of that is often not having the time to do our actual collections management work.

With that in mind, we talked about how to create time and how to protect time, two different but very important activities for how we approach our schedule with some different strategies for how you can sort of make and protect that time, especially with coworkers and your boss.

We took a look at how to batch collections management work. So thinking about our collections work and how we want to approach it for our focused time and how we may be able to build on efficiencies for, like, that maximum impact.

We also covered how to leverage the CMS for collections management work, which there are many different options depending on the tool you have to the data you can clean up or import or, place or move. So you’ve got quite a bit of options there that you can incorporate.

And then we ended with how to prepare for the focused collections management work. You’ve done all of this great work leading up to this focused time. We want to make sure that we are making the most of it and making sure that we’re prepared for that work. So with that, you should have all the strategy you need to get out there and start practicing and creating that time for yourself for this focused work.

And with that, I will turn it back over to Bradley.

Thank you, Rachel, for the wonderful presentation. And to our audience, if you’d like to learn more about our museum collections management system called Argus, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales at lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you. We’ve also listed all of our contact information on this screen. And please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to this series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today. Until next time. Thank you.