Things You'll Need:
- Microsoft Windows Excel: 2003 works nicely, but 2007 offers some filtering improvements.
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Step 1
Consider how your collection of data can be used to improve your effectiveness and efficiency, then create your Excel file to optimize retrievability of that data.
A simple alphabetic listing of artifacts is hardly more than a listing of inventory. But using Windows Excel will allow you to develop an essential tool for the creation and management of displays, loans, and inventory.
The most common error made in creating an Excel file is to force too much data into a single column. Many users tend to create a single column for ‘FullName’, but when attempting to extract data for a mailing then cannot reasonably find the first and last names for the envelope nor the first name for the salutation. By creating separate columns for Title, First Name, Middle Initial, Last Name, and Honorific, all possible combinations or subsets can be created. -
Step 2
Our museum focuses on military artifacts. A typical artifact’s description might be “Navy trousers, enlisted, dress blue, men’s, WWII (1943)”. With all this information in a single column, and with the characteristics in any sequence, that column of data is essentially useless. However, creating columns for Service, Officer?, Item, Sex, Era, and Year of Mfg, (in addition to the Description column, which does contain the full description), all the probable search characteristics have been made readily available. Using Excel’s ‘data filter’ facility, the curator can now select candidate items by choosing the appropriate characteristics from the filtered items—the catalog of artifacts now becomes an indispensable tool!
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Step 3
The second most common error in Excel is inclusion of alias terms or otherwise ambiguous item descriptions. Especially when several archivists are describing an artifact, there is the strong possibility for introduction of similar terms for the same item. In our Navy trousers example, you might find Man, Men, Mens, Men’s, Male, Masculine, or even Manly. However, if you are searching for a specific term in the column, you will find only those entries that match your specification; the others are essentially lost. In this case (and most others) it can be determined that there is a single term to be used for the Sex column for men’s trousers. What is needed now is to create a tool that allows only the term Men’s or Women’s to be added to the column; any effort to enter other data is prevented. That tool is provided in the Excel’s Data Validation feature. With Data Validation, you can limit the data to specific terms (e.g., Men’s or Women’s) or to a specific range of values (1750 through 2020—the years just preceding the Revolutionary war through 10 years into the future). Such validation reduces errors from mistyping as well as from unintentional creation of aliases.
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Step 4
There is a unique class of alias that you may need to acknowledge and manage. In our museum, we have a number of army ‘jackets’. However, that piece of uniform is (properly) called a ‘blouse’ by the marines. To improve retrievability, we’ve added an Alias column so that the ‘other’ term can also be available for filtering. Now, as for female army-nurse ‘blouses’…
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Step 5
Being able to find the description of an item is only of value if you can also find the item. So, depending on the volume of your collection, you may need to create columns for Building, Room, Container type (drum, closet, map case, file cabinet, display case, etc.), and Container number.
