A curator's dearest child - examining musical instruments for collection catalogues

A main duty of every museum curator is to make his collection accessible, under other things by publishing a collection catalogue. Methods that are employed for the examination of musical instruments have to deal with the fact that resources are limited if one aims to publish an entire collection. A corpus of 84 museum catalogues edited over the last fifty years was reviewed to give a survey of examination methods that are used within this scope. Dimensional measuring with simple tools, identification of materials by the eye and describing prevail, but more sophisticated technical methods as X-ray were applied from the late 1970s on, and scientific methods from chemistry and physics are employed on a broader base since the mid-1990s.