Databases, Core: Anthropology and Museums

Abstract

Anthropological museum collections—including both ethnographic and archaeological materials—comprise an essential source of data for understanding the dynamic uses of material culture, relationships between human behavior and its material correlates, long-term social processes, and documentation of culture history and change. A wide variety of items and associated data are stored in museums worldwide, referenced by a bewildering array of descriptive terminologies, cataloguing systems, standards and formats for recording material type, function, provenience, age, significance, and social context. Key needs include the development of accepted nomenclature, data standards, and collection management practices. Additional concerns include varying physical or metadata organization and levels of curation, which complicate scholarly access to key museum collections, although significant progress is being made in each area. Several international initiatives have created common formats for the reporting of collection information and established baseline standards for collection organization and care for individual world regions. Challenges to the long-term integrity of museum anthropological collections include conservation requirements of the objects themselves, changing legal and ethical requirements affecting access and title to materials by native groups or descendant peoples, security issues, lack of established curation and metadata standards, and the scale and associated costs of storage and curation.