SPECTRUM - Frequently Asked Questions
SPECTRUM is the UK and international standard for Collections Management. It consists of two main sections:
- Procedures
- Information requirements
What are SPECTRUM procedures?
SPECTRUM procedures define best practice for museums in completing 21 different activities:
- Pre-entry;
- Object entry;
- Loans in;
- Acquisition;
- Inventory control;
- Location movement control;
- Transport;
- Cataloguing;
- Object condition checking and technical assessment;
- Conservation and collections care;
- Risk management;
- Insurance and indemnity management;
- Valuation control;
- Audit;
- Rights management;
- Use of collections;
- Object exit;
- Loans out;
- Loss and damage;
- Deaccession and disposal;
- Retrospective documentation.
How do I use the Procedures?
All of the procedures are structured in a similar way, designed to make it easier to implement them.
Each procedure begins with a Definition. This represents a common understanding of what the procedure involves.
The definition is followed by the Minimum Standard. This sets out in simple terms what is best practice in that particular procedure.
Next is a new section called Before you start. This details the information an organisation needs to consider before it implements a procedure. It contains the Legal environment which affects its operation, and the Policy requirements that an organisation must have in place.
There the follows the Procedure section. This takes the form of a number of steps which you should follow in sequence. Where a step requires information to be recorded this is indicated and reference to the Information requirements are made.
Procedures within SPECTRUM are interrelated. Because of this, a step will sometimes require you to go away and refer to another procedure. Where this is necessary, the relevant reference is always included in the text.
Finally, each procedure includes a list publications and organisations which serve as sources of further help and advice.
What are Information requirements?
Every stage in the process of documenting an object involves information. This information might be about the object's history, it might be about who owns it, where it comes from, or things that have happened to it since it entered the museum.
The tremendous value of SPECTRUM is that it enables museums to collect this information in a standard way. This means that it be turned into knowledge, which the museum can put to work both in creating services to users and for it's own management and administration.
Because an object can contain so much information, the information requirements are necessarily quite complex. To simplify them, they have been broken down into Units of information. These are the lowest level of information-recording and may represent data in one field of a documentation system.
Sets of related Units are brought together into Information groups. These enable the recording of: an object (both physically and with regard to events in its history); events that take place in the organisation (e.g. an audit); persons, organisations, peoples and places, etc. associated with objects and events.
How do I use the Units of information?
Each Unit of information described in standard way:
- A definition;
- Guidance on how to record the information;
- An example of the kind of information specified;
- Guidance on how and when to use;
- A list of the procedures in which a particular it is needed.
An 'ordinary' user of a documentation system will not have to know the details of Units as it is likely that they are implemented in their collections managaement system.
Is there an introduction to SPECTRUM?
There are several ways to begin to learn about SPECTRUM. The Collections Trust publishes a series of short factsheets which cover the various parts of the standard. You can download these from our Factsheets page.
We also provide the Introduction to Documentation training module which will give you an overview of how SPECTRUM works. Refer to the Training section for further information.
