Field Manual For Museums

This manual has been prepared to aid those individuals- monument custodians, park naturalists, historians, and museum curators- who operate National Park Service museums in the field. This manual provides some convenient sources of information on the intricacies of various museum techniques.

Excerpt from Field Manual for Museums His manual has been prepared to aid those individuals - monument custodians, park naturalists, historians, and museum curators - who operate National Park Service museums in the field. For these men, who are creative experts in the art of interpreting their areas to the public, museums are among the important instruments employed in the notable service they perform. Therefore, they frequently require some convenient source of information on the intricacies of the various museum techniques. The contents have been determined by past experiences in answering the requests which come in from the field for advice on handling the many museum problems which arise. It would be impossible to encompass in one large book, or even several volumes, a complete description of all the phases of museum construction and maintenance. The allied techniques of collect ing and preserving material objects, not to mention their preparation and exhibition, would require still more space. Such facts of operation as occur infrequently or require the services of the specialist have been mentioned but briefly or entirely omitted. Other phases have been emphasized and in some cases repeated under several headings. This is particularly true of safe practices and precautions to be followed, so that injury to the custodian, as well as to the historic and scientific material under his charge, may be avoided. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reference work on conservation, collection, preparation & display of collections; non Aboriginal material.

Among the most important contributions the National Park Service has made since its founding in 1916 has been the development of extraordinary museum technology and administration---national in scope and international in influence. This manual, a distillation of what many persons have learned about the day-to-day operations of museums, is meant to provide curatorial standards and serve as a reference for museum workers everywhere. This book was written by Ralph H. Lewis, an outstanding museum administrator and curator with many years of experience in the National Park Service. It is an outgrowth of an earlier (1941) volume entitled Field Manual for Museums by Ned J. Burns, a work that went out of print during World War II and is, even to this day, in demand by curators and museum managers. In this present manual, Mr. Lewis carries on a tradition of excellence in museum practice that can be traced back to the mid-1930's when Carl P. Russell set the basic pattern for museum work in the national parks. In those early years most park museums could not afford or were too small to engage a full time professional museum staff. Dr. Russell set up centralized laboratories staffed by curators and preparators and provided the parks with exhibition and preservation expertise from this pool. The ordinary maintenance and operation of the museums were left to the superintendents who managed the parks, and to the archeologists, historians and naturalists who interpreted them.