Organization of Information in Museums:

A preliminary record is the first record created after the acquisition of the artifact. If the artifact is to be kept, then an accession record is created. Groups of similar items are not given their own individual accession records, the are assigned to a single lot with one accession number. But each individual object is categorized their own numerical sequences.

In museums other than natural history museums, after the creation of accession records items are cataloged.

Provenance is also important information and is essential in determining the name of the object. According to Harvard's Provenance Research site, "provenance" is a list of the the previous owners of a work of art, tracing it from its present location and owner back to the hand of the artist (2004, para. 2). All of the other information about the object must appear with the provenance and condition in the catalog or registration record. One important difference between creating records for museum objects and text is that the objects are unknown at the time of the accessioning and registering.

Visual materials are often the most difficult to describe because the descriptions rely on the describer. When words are not available the description relies on the perception of the person creating the description. As the saying goes, "I say potato, you say potatoe." When there are no words available to describe the object, it is up to the discretion of the describer to find a word. According to Arlene Taylor (2004), "Subject analysis is also more difficult for visual materials-an image cannot tell in words what it is about" (p. 12). This brings to mind the black & white pictures used by many psychiatrists. If you have 30 different people look at the same picture, you will have 30 different opinions. Subject analysis is subject to the perception of the individual.