26 The study of the biases locked in the identity of an organization has become an area of study important to museums. Several types of museums have been the focus of ideological analysis. Many authors have identified the problems of museum collections particularly as they relate to other cultures.24 So Jonathan King of the British Museum has noted the bias of ethnology collections as a result of these saving patterns:

Art galleries, too, have had critical evaluation of their biases and ideological messages.26

27 Living history sites, too, have had much critical reassessment offered on a number of themes such as: the tendency to overt patriotic overstatement; the tendency to nostalgia, to emotion over accuracy; the sanitization of the past, removing disease, hardship, and conflict; the failure to discuss all sectors of society, excluding women, minorities, or lower class citizens.27 As a sub-set of this historical review, the local community history museum has received its own analysis.28

28 All museums must, by definition, tell a selected story. The telling of these stories is the museum's purpose and represents its unique societal role. The generic community museum in Canada presents a promotional message either of its founders—the pioneer, the loyalists, the settlers (the terminology changes with the region and the group)—or of its most significant citizens of later decades, providing a nostalgic touchstone or, in the spirit of boosterism, a marker for the unique accomplishments of the area. The science or technology museum projects a message of growth, progress and invention. The decorative arts museum celebrates the quality of workmanship and artistic skill and the excellence of cultural goods. The ethnic museum reports the unique value of the cultural group, their struggles, successes and contributions.29

29 Many issues are typically neglected as a result of the history and fabric of the organization as Robert Turner and others have pointed to: the natural history context of human behaviour; pre-settlement material whether about the natural environment or human experience; non-European cultures other than as primitive, exotic, conquered or disappearing peoples; twentieth century events; children's lives, women's or minorities' histories; dirt, disease and hardship, international peace; urban processes; scientific failures.30

30 The complete ideological context of the museum is, however, complicated to unravel; the messages are often contradictory and changeable, translating often haphazardly into the functions of the institution which would be revealed in bias and ideology. The purpose may be at some point formalized in legislation or acts of incorporation. James Smithson's endowment, for example, was intended for "the increase and diffusion of knowledge" which became the operative mission of the Smithsonian. The Royal Ontario Museum's stated purpose is to hold "The Record of Nature Through the Ages" and "The Arts of Mankind Through All Time."31 In recent years, these phrases of intent have been replaced by more comprehensive institutional mandate statements and policies, following good museological practice, but often the remnants of the ideological operators remain in the collections, in the exhibits and even in the architecture.

31 For collections assessment, the resulting questions of bias centre on the representativeness, typicality, accuracy of the resulting assortment and the collection's utility for research, display and education. It is important to note, however, in the midst of analyzing museum collections bias, that the very existence of these special assortments of human life experiences—even the very patterns of selection and assortment—is historical evidence of the social act of collection and is itself an artifact, and worth researching.

32 Collections, for all their idiosyncrasies, do seem to follow some patterns of formation. A collection may be formed by chance or by accident; the dependence on donation over acquisition, the result of inadequate funding and the absence of collecting policies, exaggerates this adhockery. For example, up until the late 1930s, Canadian material in the Royal Ontario Museum represented odds and ends left over from the earlier collections of the Canadian Institute and the Provincial Museum of David Boyle, which came to the museum in 1933 combined with sundry material donated by citizens or businesses.32 With the drive and the funds of the amateur collector and wealthy businessman Sir Sigmund Samuel, the significant collections of Canadiana were created and a branch department set up housed in a new, separate building of the Royal Ontario Museum.33

33 One of the problems, however, in using behavioural models along the lines of Schiffer's is the underestimation of several factors involved in the equation of museum collections such as the role of unique individual contributions. In fact, museums are territories of individual behaviours and subject to the influence of personalities, whether of founders, donors or staff. There are myriad example of whimsical or idiosyncratic collections defined by personal predilection which are the root of collecting motives. For example, the collection of George and Helen Gardiner, which forms the heart of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto (founded in 1984, now part of the Royal Ontario Museum), began with the acquisition of yellow porcelain to match their Toronto living room decor while the pre-Columbian items were placed in their recreation room.34 In 1980, the Gardiner's collection intent turned from a connoisseurial interest to a serious comprehensive collection of ceramics, particularly of European porcelain. The comprehensive Yaremko Glass collection of 1110 items donated to the Royal Ontario Museum's Canadiana Department in 1980-81 began as an interest in collecting the desirable Maple Leaf pattern on pressed glass, the ultimate Canadian symbol.35 Similar stories abound in the history of museum collections elsewhere.

34 Collections are not all arbitrary, however. They can also be expressions of the need to be comprehensive and even systematic in a certain way. Sigmund Samuel developed a comprehensive collection of Canadian historical pictorial works; eighteenth and nineteenth century oil paintings, water-colours, drawings and prints, portraits of kings, generals, politicians and explorers combined with landscapes. Added to this were maps, drawings and books as well as documents. The material was primarily related to Canada's past but included American and British material. The final number of items given to the Canadiana Gallery was 7000, donated from 1939 to the mid-1960s.

35 Sigmund Samuel's collection also reveals a clear message system, one might even call it an ideology. He had a deep love for the history and geography of Canada; he was a nationalist who advocated imperial unity and saw the British Empire as a means to develop Canadian national stature, views which sparked his collecting focus on the Seven Years War. Since his youth, Samuel had been preoccupied with events "that had made Canada British." Hence, in 1934 he published The Seven Years War in Canada, with 101 illustrations of paintings from his collection, four old maps and extensive quotes from original documents.36

36 With this analysis and the formation of museum collecting policies and active acquisition, we have entered another stage of the museum transformation process of material evidence.

39 Directions in collecting can be changed by the curators, donors, directors or even board members active in the institutions. By the 1960s, following Sigmund Samuel's death, the Canadiana collection of the Royal Ontario Museum expanded beyond Samuel's taste for two-dimensional works to the decorative arts of furniture, silver, ceramics, woodcarving and glass as directed by the interests of curatorial staff.37

40 At some point, analysis must evaluate the collection in terms of the representative coverage in a collection given the patterns of diffusion of material evidence both in society and in museums themselves. This analysis should be complemented by a comparative study of the other collections in public or private hands in order to build up a sense of the patterns of evidence. This task may not be so difficult for the art gallery in which collections typically range from hundreds to the low thousands while curators can know from experience which institutions hold particular art works. For material historians, however, the problems of the numbers of artifacts which typically number 5000 and upwards can be overwhelming. These are the complex problems in the assessment criteria for representativeness within collections that shadow the intellectual streams identified in Tom Schlereth's work.38 More research is required to itemize the typical biases within museum collections along the lines of Turner, based on comparative studies of museums and their collecting histories.

41 There are fortunately many significant examples of collections analysis to redress bias in Canadian collections. The Canadian Museum of Civilization History Division, in its collecting and exhibition work of the 1970s and 1980s, has struggled to redress some of the imbalances of history.39 The Royal British Columbia Museum, the Provincial Museum of Alberta and the Western Development Museum are three examples where collections assessment have informed research and museum policies.40 There have also been significant attempts to redress problems in collections representation through more active collecting programs, particularly in the contemporary collecting arena.41 Unfortunately, such collections analysis in the field of nineteenth and twentieth century material culture has not yet occurred in the selected Toronto institutions. One exception is the assessment of Canadian furniture provided by Janet Holmes of the Canadiana Gallery.42 As part of the reassessment of the collection's significance, the Canadiana Gallery was renamed the Canadian Decorative Arts Department in 1986. Plans for a museum for the City of Toronto also holds out hope for more comprehensive material culture collections. Future steps will force an evaluation of the collections of the Toronto Historical Board and surrounding museums.

42 Beyond the collecting policies, the documentation of collections can limit or assist collections utilization. Tom McFeat has identified an object-data continuum. At one end, the object is the dominant item. This is usually due to the fact that there is no surviving data to accompany an artifact or the dominance of an intrinsic property—such as aesthetic— or other features for which it was collected (structure, colour, form, curiosity, magic, ritual, value).43 At the other end is the data or research support material: notes, measurements, drawings, charts, graphs, photographs, models, letters, field notes. This could also include a record of its organizational usage, the museological record.

43 The act of recording the full range of material evidence is, however, very difficult, labour intensive, time consuming and very costly and has until recent decades been limited by our lack of understanding of documentation as an information system. The history and orientation of the museum is usually revealed in the documentation system. If the collection was formed with connoisseurial purpose, records focus on questions of style and identification as at the Canadiana Gallery of the Royal Ontario Museum. Subsequent usage of recorded evidence for alternative research purposes is hence limited.

44 If the collection was formed to convey a historical story, the record of the context was frequently not available from the donor or vendor nor solicited by the museum staff. Record keeping for Canadian museums has developed primarily during the 1960s and 1970s, the result of intensive efforts in the training for records and registration management. Collections are often only partially registered or catalogued, frequently in several different record systems, while the enormous labour involved in updating has maintained backlogs of work even in the age of the microcomputer. In the case of larger museums as well, record keeping has been faulty, thereby limiting research utility. A percentage of identifying numbers and support evidence have been lost, or staff cannot keep up with the quantities of registration and cataloguing required.

45 For example, it is estimated that about one-third of the collections of the Toronto Historical Board (which runs five site museums in Toronto) were not registered as of May 1985. In the Royal Ontario Museum Ethnology Department's collections, a large number of the objects have had their original identification numbers lost as a matter of course over the years, a common state for museums.

46 But even given a workable record system, does the subject heading organization or classification index represent an accurate, usable finding aid for minds other than that of its creator? Frequently, the organization of the records obfuscates historical meaning by separating items from original connections or alternate associations, thus creating new meanings and removing original ones. Here, I would suggest that museum documentation could learn something from the archival attention to provenance, and must be informed by its history in the museum house including judgements of curators and cataloguers. Clearly, research on the documentation procedure of particular museums becomes part of the act of research about the objects, necessary to decoding the research message.

47 In 1969, the then Director of the Museum Studies Department at Leicester University, Raymond Singleton, wrote that "It is a poor sort of museum which has unique information locked up in its collections and records, unobtainable because it has no organized method of retrieving it."44 Fortunately for this generation of museum workers and researchers, the forces of computerization may hold out real benefits for the assessment of our collections, painful as many of the transitions are. Works such as Andrew Roberts' Planning the Documentation of Museum Collections and Elizabeth Orna's and Charles Pettitt's Information Handling in Museums hold out conceptual schemes for improve information-handling abilities in museums.45

48 Notwithstanding this litany of problems of the museum artifactual record, there is also great potential to add to the research record. There are a variety of methods for examining material evidence for research purposes. The most accessible is the use of visual examination of surface, materials, methods of construction as well as style, design and iconography. But there are also scientific methods for examination available to the researcher, at least in consort with experts.

49 Visual examination most often follows comparative stylistic methods, or the formalist method, wherein stylistic characteristics of objects are evaluated against known objects. An example is a case of several historical Canadian prints in the Canadiana collection that had been attributed to William Henry Bartlett; the signature in the lower right-hand corner read Bartlett but the pieces raised questions as they did not resemble his known work. The curator at the Canadiana Gallery, Mary Allodi, has recently unravelled this mystery using the techniques of stylistic comparison; she noted the similarity with works by Coke Smyth and has discovered the Bartlett signature is most likely a later addition put there by an enthusiastic dealer or collector.46

50 But there is material evidence beyond the indicators of style and execution. Examination can begin to distinguish visual evidence such as surface hardness, distinguishing marks using the eye, magnifying glass, stereo microscopes, etc. Next, variable light sources and photographic techniques can be used to examine the work in more detail, for example, visible light photography, raking light photography, ultra-violet light examination, infrared examination, X-ray radiography, strata-radiography, colour radiography, stereo X-radiography and electron-radiography.

51 Beyond surface study, examinations of a single point or piece of a work can be done, for example, identification of a layer such as a pigment, microscopic examination, and microchemical analysis. Instrumental methods such as radio-carbon dating, and neutron activation study for trace elements, are also possible tools for the researcher.

52 With this discussion, we have entered the field of material science, a field yet to be exploited by material historians. Material science presents a rich variety of methods for materials investigation. An extension of engineering and physical sciences, material science has been used by scientific archaeologists, geologists, palaeontologists and art historians, for the most part to address questions of authenticity and identification as well as conservation.47 The numerous scientific procedures which can be used to unlock the intrinsic data of the artifact raise the ultimate spectre of rebuttal to Hesseltine's challenge. So far, these methods of analysis have been used to answer questions of what, how and when objects have been made; questions of the manner in which these items were used or their significance in society are more difficult to discuss with material science skills, but the evidence does provoke speculation and hypothesis creation.

53 Material science does indicate one of the most fruitful directions for material culture research will be that of interdisciplinary team work, joining expertise in a variety of fields to address general research questions or to assess specific collections. Unfortunately, all too few museums have scientific laboratories available for some of the more complicated scientific analyses. More and more frequently, however, museums do have some conservation expertise which can be utilized for examination of artifacts. Arrangements can also be made with nearby universities or medical laboratories to use their expertise for artifact study, such as the X-ray facilities of local veterinarians or doctors. Much of the work of material evidence analysis requires the networking of several museums or museum workers in teamwork research.

54 Sometimes curatorial staff fruitfully conduct research on the history and registration of their collection's documentation to re-create the information context of these items. In the ethnology department of the Royal Ontario Museum, in-house field work is conducted on the collections to determine their identification, original source and so on, using the evidence of the complex history of the collections with noteworthy success not only for re-identifying pieces, but also for establishing new perspectives on the collections.48

55 There are already many examples of material science successes particularly in the fields of archaeometry and the study of ancient materials. There have also been some successes in the study of more modern materials, from the study of the trace elements of native trade beads in New World archaeology collections in the Royal Ontario Museum to the study of nails to date post-eighteenth century houses.49

56 Objects can also be altered by museum actions through storage, conservation, display and usage. Material is lost, destroyed and altered despite the intentions of their keepers. Frequently, objects are altered by vendors who doctor them or by curators who have removed or added physical characteristics based on their educated judgement as to what they really looked like. These actions, however, have frequently not been recorded although they too become part of the evidential base. Fortunately, modern ethics of conservation and restoration counter these tendencies along with the development of condition records which document physical alterations of an object.

57 Restorations of historic houses and sites are particularly problematic, especially when records of the restoration are not kept nor information about the selection of the objects recorded. At Fort York in the Toronto Historical Board, for example, the Officers' Sitting Room, restored in 1968, presents several problems to the present curator, Carl Benn, who must assess the accuracy of both the restorations and the collections. In addition, a collection's integrity is also affected by loss, destruction and alteration, sometimes by the normal day-to-day wear, and sometimes by incautious usage. Many objects at Fort York were lost or damaged when public social events were held in the buildings in earlier decades and artifacts were carted away or damaged. This is not an unfamiliar story within the history of museums but it creates a situation in which collections assessment for research purposes must include evaluation of museum usage and corresponding alteration of material evidence.