Museum Online Help

Introduction

The Somerset Cricket Museum (SCM) Collections include both archives and museum objects, and although these are all part of the whole Collection, they have different cataloguing requirements.

From the homepage you can choose whether to browse the Featured Collections or the Museum Collections. Alternatively, using the Search facility, you can select, from the search results, the relevant items for either Collection, (the Search will bring up entries for both).

Homepage and layout

The Homepage describes the Museum itself (do watch the short video), provides links to the latest News, Articles and Snippets and gives you the opportunity to join or donate to the Museum.

The Menu Bar allows you to obtain further information related to the Museum (About), browse through the News, Articles and Snippets,  Featured and Museum Collection in various ways and carry out a basic search.

The menu bar is visible throughout the Website, giving you an easy way to return to the Homepages, Search page, or to select a browse options and there is a link to this ‘Help’ page.

Selecting the Menu items on the title bar will take you to the pages related to the Somerset Cricket Museum itself or the Museum Online facilities where you can find out more about how to view our Collections.

Further links at the bottom of the page will take you to the privacy policy and accessibility statement.

Searching: Main Search

If you want to search the whole of the online archive catalogue for a key word or words:

  • Enter a key word or words in the search box. Click on ‘Search’.
  • From results, to view a catalogue entry in full, click on the title or the reference number.

Note that:

  • Searches will work whether you use upper or lower case letters.
  • All searches default to relevance order. At this time there is no facility to sort entries by reference number, date or title.

Search results

From the search results page, you can

  • Print the results
  • Click on a catalogue entry, to access more information

You can also contact us about this item by clicking on the ‘Request for Information’ link and adding details to the online form.

Browsing the Museum or Featured collections

These links allow you to browse through our collections in various ways, and can be accessed from the homepage or by clicking on the menu bar at any point.

  • Browse by Collection Family: Use this to find objects categorised under Family headings such as Cricket Clothing and Equipment or Cricket and Club History, Family sub-headings and individual Categories.
  • Featured collections: Here you can look through some of our key, highlighted collections which are also described on the Museum Display page.

Archival descriptions

The SCM Collections are made up of descriptions of records at three levels ranging from the general (Family level) down to the particular  category within the Family. This arrangement helps to put the records in their context by clearly showing where they came from and how they relate to other records from the same source. We use the following levels in our catalogue.

Level 1 – Family Collections: A set of items intrinsically linked together, such as an album of photographs or a bundle of documents which can be further sub-divided into individual photographs or single papers.

Level 2 – Family Sub-Collections: A group of items, such as photograph albums or diaries, created or put together by the originator or by the cataloguer because of related content or format.

Level 3 – The Museum Assets: Assets that consist of records created, received and used by a particular individual or organisation. Each asset has a reference number such as 00632. This number is assigned based on the date that the collection was deposited in an ascending numeric from 00001.

Asset: A single physical unit, such as a photograph or film. Every Asset has a unique reference code.

Piece: An element of an Item, such as a page in a volume (at present the SCM does not go to this level).

Of the levels described above, only an Asset is a producible unit, i.e. you may only request to view an Asset level record from our collections.