The 11 main categories for object classification are:
Structures
Building Furnishings
Personal Artifacts
Tools and Equipment for Materials
Tools and Equipment for Science and Technology
Tools and Equipment for Communication
Distribution and Transportation Artifacts
Communication Artifacts
Recreational Artifacts
Natural History
The objects are being classified using Nomenclature 3.0 for Museum Cataloging, edited by Paul Bourcier, Ruby Rogers and the Nomenclature Committee.
This edition is a revised and expanded version of The Revised Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging. The Revised Nomenclature broadened the system that Robert Chenhall and his colleagues developed in the 1970s. The original Nomenclature was instituted to create a system that gave museums with human-made collections the same level of consistency and specificity that scientific collections have to name specimens. Consistent naming makes research, discovering connections between items, and sharing data easier.
This classification system is a hierarchical grouping of like items. The categories, classifications and terms are organized by object function. Nomenclature 3.0 is expanded from the previous version and includes thousands of new terms. However it is not meant to be all-inclusive. In keeping with the Nomenclature authors’ intention to provide a “practical, flexible framework,” PastPerfect’s Lexicon enables you to add terms for your collections within the framework, use more or less specific terms for object naming, and employ multiple object names for multipurpose and compound items.
Nomenclature 3.0 is built into PastPerfect and accessed when you enter a new catalog record. Each object name is checked against the approved list to ensure consistent data entry.