When a museum acquires objects for its collections, it can be obtained in a variety of methods. Most often objects are either given by donors or purchased from galleries, private collections or other vendors of objects. Other methods can be by bequest, exchange with or shared with another institution or from the field. The process that occurs is called accessioning, which in many cases involves assigning a unique identification number for tracking purposes and creating a file which includes documentation of how the object was acquired, donor information, condition of the object and other pertinent catalogue information regarding the object.
In the years working for the Judah Magnes Musem, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I was either directly involved or supervised the acquisition process of thousands of art objects. These range from paintings, sculptures, ethnographic, works on paper, photographs, illustrated books, textiles and costumes, ceremonial objects and another wide variety. In this process, I assigned numbers, marked the objects and tracked their locations and created the files.
