How to Inventory a Public Art Collection

Many public art programs run on a spreadsheet maintained by one person, a shared folder of photos, and a general memory of where things are. This approach can support a program well enough until the coordinator changes, or a councillor directly asks how many works the city actually owns.

An inventory fixes this. Not a grand, freeze-everything-for-a-year sort of inventory, but the kind you can start this week with the records you already have, improved one work at a time.

Start with what you have

Wherever your collection is, that is where you start. Whether it's a spreadsheet, a retired PDF walking tour, an open data feed from the city, a box of physical files, or photos on a phone: all of this is useful. Each source holds a piece of the real truth, and your job now is to pull them into one place instead of five. Calgary Arts Development started exactly there, and their Calgary Public Art Guide still reads the City of Calgary's open data so ward and community information stays current on its own.

To start, pick the ten most fleshed-out work records you have, and write them up properly, being sure that your record covers all the fields available from all your different sources. It doesn't hurt to review recommended schema on schema.org, to ensure you're using industry-standard field names for your record.

What a record should hold

Ideally, you'll start with at least a title and a photo, but if you want your record to be trusted for years, you'll want to capture the whole life of the work:

• Identity: title, a stable accession number, the year, and the type of work (mural, sculpture, installation).
• Location: a precise point, the name of the site, and who owns the wall or land it sits on, if that information is available. Many murals live on private buildings under a license, so a change of owner can quickly result in a work being removed.
• Attribution: the artist, credited the way they want to be credited, plus anyone who shared the commission.
• Materials and making: medium, dimensions, and fabrication notes. These factors determine how the work ages and how it needs to be cleaned.
• Provenance: how the work entered the collection. Was it commissioned, donated, transferred, or acquired through percent for art? Be sure to attach paperwork.
• Condition: a baseline condition report and a place to log further reports.
• Rights: what the program may publish, reproduce, and license.

You can find our recommended field set in our inventory field checklist. These fields don't all have to be filled out on day one, but you do need to have a place for each field so the record can grow over time.

What managing a schema actually entails

Let's say you're planning a trip to the mountains, and are collecting requirements from your relatives before locking in plans. Your cousin Bertie sends a tidy document listing her allergies, her hotel preference, and three things she wants to do. Dwayne texts a photo of a receipt with a hotel name written on the back and nothing else. Your great aunt's contribution is typewritten and immaculate, except a coffee spill has darkened the line where she listed her allergies.

You sigh to yourself, and open up a spreadsheet. You create a column for allergies, a column for hotel preference, a column for requested activities. Immediately, you start to notice some missing fields. You phone Dwayne to ask what he can't eat (turns out he's got both lactose and gluten intolerance). You call your aunt and ask her to clarify the line that was under the stain.

This might just be the work of an afternoon, but in doing so, you've defined a schema, which is the agreed set of fields every entry carries, and you enriched the records, which is chasing the missing values until those fields are filled.

Public art records are much the same. The formats differ, the richness differs, and the work lies in agreeing on the fields and filling them.

A spreadsheet is fine for ten works, but gets chaotic around a hundred entries. A single artist might have their name misspelled a few times in the document, a location isn't filled out because a team member can't find the time to geolocate it, and two rows describe the same sculpture with a completely different title.

What fixes it is structure: controlled lists to enforce one record per work, with fields modeled on the standards registrars already use, like CDWA/CCO and the Getty vocabularies. Borrowing those standards rather than inventing your own can save you a lot of time. These standards are put in place to provide a shared vocabulary for organizations to use, so your records can mean the same thing to a conservator, a researcher, and someone in the next city who wants to compare notes. It's also what lets a record become a public page later, with an expected structure for photos, stories, and its location for the map.

Keep it current

An inventory has no finish line. Condition changes with every winter, works get painted over, and sculptures are moved. Programs that stay current build this upkeep into their normal work: after each inspection, be sure to report on the work's condition. Make a quick note when a work moves, and give the public a way for them to flag what changed, gated by staff approval before anything publishes, of course.

Kept current, your inventory becomes the source of truth that every other decision leans on: what to conserve, where to commission next, and what to show the council when they inevitably have questions.

If you steward a collection and want to see what your records look like as a dedicated catalog rather than a spreadsheet, that's exactly what collections management is built for. Book a demo and we'll map your works together.