The Inventory Activity of the Diocesan Museum in Płock

Abstract

The first professional inventory books for the Diocesan Museum in Płock were made when the Rev. canon Aleksander Dmochowski was its head. In order to work out the museum stores special books were prepared. Precise information ensuring the identification of the object has been placed in separate rubrics in a defined order. The books under consideration were regularly supplemented in the post-war period, marking the changes with accuracy, thus informing about indispensable interventions.

In the 1980s a new manner of cataloguing objects was conceived. This was an attempt to make documentation uniform on the basis of the state regulations binding at the time.

Apart from the inventory of the museum objects it was decided to catalogue the more precious objects in the territory of the whole of the diocese. The catalogues of 260 parishes were designed. They all contained the history of a parish, descriptions of local customs, thorough description of the church together with, if there were any, archival descriptions dealing with the object, or descriptions of the church which had earlier existed. The inventory files did not leave out the more interesting lay objects which were not connected with a local cult, if there was any. A photographic documentation and detailed plans of the objects under description were enclosed with the text. In result of such a large-scale inventory the Museum gained many collections. The current cataloguing of the sacral objects is sporadic, though the Instruction of how to work out, say, evidential cards of the Centre of the Documentation of Monuments is fully applied to the monuments of church art. The implementation of such a documentation is a duty resulting from the Code of Canon Law.