BCHS Comprehensive Inventory Phase 3

The inventory fell 248 objects short of its goal of 1890 objects and object components, and did not reach the short term impact of the project. The rate of objects inventoried per hour was 2.8, compared to the expected 3.5 objects/hour. This number includes the time and items done by the project director. In part, the goal was not achieved due to slow work by the collections assistants. There was a major drop off in work being done during the last 4 weeks of the project, when the average rate was 1.5 objects/hour. Although the project director attempted to spur the collections assistants to work faster and provided both advice and directions to speed up the pace, they were unwilling to make improvements to their process and work flow. Since the project was nearly complete in terms of hours worked and paid, BCHS allowed the collections assistants to finish their hours, rather than terminate the contracts. BCHS is going to reevaluate the terms of the contract for each collections assistant to prevent this problem in future phases.

In addition, the short term impact was not reached due to changing object counts for each zone of the inventory. Under previous cataloging procedures, artifacts in the BCHS collection have been inconsistently recorded in individual catalog records. Sometimes groups of similar artifacts were assigned the same number, while other times they were given different numbers. This creates a problem in the count of artifacts if only catalog records are considered, since hundreds of catalog records have multiple individual artifacts or component parts. During the inventory, individual artifacts are being renumbered and assigned new catalog records, or are being combined into one record, if it makes sense to separate them, and if doing so will not disrupt their accessions. For this reason, both catalog record and object component counts are listed. This factor affected this phase 3 project since a number of artifacts inventoried were not included in the initial inventory count. As a result, zone 3 was not completed, and would not have been even if the phase met its goal of 1890 objects.

The items remaining from zone 3 will be inventoried during the phase 4 project, and the inventory phasing plan has been updated to reflect these changes. The revised phasing plan is attached. The BCHS has also completed a portion of its shelving and rehousing project, which altered the museum basement storage, and consequently the zone area of some of the items being inventoried. The project zone 4 has moved, and now includes part of zone 3, while the other zones have also been adjusted with new object counts. The interphase inventory 3 has expanded to include all objects remaining in the museum - the gun storage closet, the flat files, the oversized artifacts, and the exhibits. This should also include any objects not inventoried in zone 4 after the phase 4 inventory. The exhibits were originally included in interphase inventory 4, which has been adjusted to only include objects remaining in the annex.