The last two and a half weeks have been dominated by folios and PastPerfect in the collections building. I have been going through folios with over sized images. Each folio has a theme of some sort, the two that I have finished are N&W railroad and public buildings in Roanoke. I have looked at more trains than I ever wanted to in my life in the last couple of weeks. As I go through each folio, I separate the images into three piles: no accession numbers, not in PastPerfect, and done. Each image is added to an Excel spreadsheet so that Ashley knows exactly what we have and what we do not. For images that do not have numbers, they are described in the spreadsheet so that we know what they are after they are accessioned. The numbered ones not in PastPerfect create the biggest headache for me.
PastPerfect is a widely used museum system, and it is also the cheapest for a museum to purchase. As the museum I work with does not have a large budget, PastPerfect is the most affordable system for us to use. It is an aggravating item of software as useful as it is. There are dozens of small things to remember to do for each entry and it becomes very dull and repetitive. PastPerfect is incredibly useful as it isn’t hard to navigate and there are more than enough categories so that one is able to give every relevant detail about the object or image. After adding all of the information, I scanned both sides of the images to add to PastPerfect with the metadata for the image. The entire process for one photograph can take anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour depending on how much information there is about the image and if the scan is good the first time around. While PastPerfect is a useful tool for a curator, it is a pain to use.
