Objects worth documenting

A violin may be called the same instrument for three centuries while acquiring a new bridge, new pegs, a new fingerboard, a neck graft, repairs to the body, a replaced bass bar, a different soundpost, and several generations of restoration. Almost every component that determines how it responds to being played has been replaced at least once, and in a well-cared-for instrument, more than once.

For Project Nikolaos this is not a defect in the record. It is the question.

When we say that an old object has survived, what exactly has survived? At least four different things are being run together in that one word, and an experiment that does not separate them will produce a result about whichever one it happened to mean.

There is the named continuity: an unbroken chain of people calling it the same instrument, recorded in sales, insurance, concert programmes and repair invoices. This is often the best-documented thing about an old object and it is not a physical fact.

There is the material continuity: which wood, which varnish, which pieces of the original are still present. This is a physical fact and it is usually partial, sometimes surprisingly so.

There is the repair lineage: the dated sequence of interventions, each of which changed the object's behaviour and some of which were reversals of earlier ones. Where this is documented it is the most valuable thing in the file. Where it is not, its absence is the most important thing in the file.

And there is the present measurable state, which is the only one of the four that an instrument in a laboratory can actually report on, and which is a fact about now.

A violin makes these four come apart in a way that is impossible to ignore, which is why the registry begins with them rather than with something simpler. An object that forces the distinction is more useful to us than an object that lets us avoid it.

Every entry carries a status describing where it stands in our own files, and nothing else. No status asserts that an object is significant, and there is no status that could.

Several of them exist mainly to record that nothing has happened. Custodian contact required means precisely that nobody has been contacted. Reference only means the entry is a citation of a public museum record, made without approaching anyone. Suggested means somebody mentioned it to us.