Friday, we summerized our look at the Japanese practice of using a labled, tied, wooden box to store pottery.
The contemporary US museum has a number of ways of labeling (associating data to) its art work.
We might start by considering the typical museum wall label. Which is usually a rectangular piece of paper with the basic information about the piece.
Calvert Guthris and Paul Werner, note a few additional concerns in their posts to the Book Arts ListServ . Paul Werner writes:
I)Style-wise, there are two approaches:
a) The old-fashioned "let's type it up on the IBM selectric" approach, in
which the curator oversees the project to the end (I've seen white-haired
fuddies actually wander through exhibitions at the opening, assistant in
tow, dictating rewrites).
b) The new-fangled "show-biz" approach, in which the exhibition design is
handed over to a professional designer or architect. In such a case the
labels are written up and provided by the curators well ahead of time, and
then the designer gets "creative" in terms of style, placement and so forth.
Museums and the Online Archive of California
is developing a format to store information about their works in an electronic format. The
MOAC Technical Specifications Working Draft includes:
1: Electronic Location & Access URL
2: Creator/Maker
The name of a person or corporate entity responsible for the design or creation of the object. Where an individual artist is unknown,
this field should contain a designation by school and period or the name of the culture group responsible for the creation of the work.
3: Object Name/Title
4: Date of Creation/Date Range
5: Place of Origin/Discovery
6: Medium/Materials
7: Techniques/Process
8: Dimensions
9: Current Repository Name
10: Current Object ID Number
11: Provenance
The name of a previous owner of the object.
12: Notes
Textual description of object; object history: associated people, organizations, places, and events in the object's history;...
13: Subject Matter (Art & Architecture Thesaurus standard vocabulary)
14: Type of Object (Art & Architecture Thesaurus standard vocabulary)
15: Style/Period/Group/Movement/School (Art & Architecture Thesaurus standard vocabulary)
Then there is the actual attaching of a label onto the piece, which is used to catalog one's collection, and not really expository.
The Department of Interior's Museum Property Handbook goes into good detail on this, including how to label a mass of ceramic shards. Pg. E3
Do these folks sign their labels?
11:44:24 PM 
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