New Report: Prioritization in Museum Collections – A Part of War and Disaster Preparedness

Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation, by Hannah Turner Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation, by Hannah Turner. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2020. xiii + 243 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $85.00; paperbound, $32.95; eBook, $32.95. Ricardo L. Punzalan Ricardo L. Punzalan University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2021) 43 (4): 129–131. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.4.129 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ricardo L. Punzalan; Review: Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation, by Hannah Turner. The Public Historian 1 November 2021; 43 (4): 129–131. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.4.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search Hannah Turner’s Cataloguing Culture is a necessary and timely addition to the expanding body of work that interrogates the colonial legacies of natural history museums. What makes this book particularly refreshing and unique is that, for once, objects and specimens are not the center of attention. Turner focuses, instead, on more banal, yet profoundly influential, apparatuses of museum practice and metadata: recording and registration, museum-published field guides and circulars, the ledger book, the card catalogue and classification system, and the database. Turner is a scholar of information and museum studies and currently an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Information. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, Cataloguing Culture presents Turner’s extensive ethnographic research at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). She eloquently takes readers through the history of this museum’s descriptive practices for ethnological objects, the rules that govern them, the key figures in... You do not currently have access to this content.

symbols of meaning. If a basic wonder about man is his capacity for building culture, certainly the next wonder is his astounding capacity for making things as part of his culture. In this he surpasses the animal a thousand times in cunning, power, imaginativeness, beauty, destructiveness, and grandeur. To know man we must study the things he has made-the Parthenon, the Panama Canal, Stonehenge, the computer, the Taj Mahal, the space capsule, Michelangelo's Pietti, the highway cloverleaf, the Great Pyramid, Rembrandt's self-portraits. The artifacts made and used by a people are not only a basic expression of that people; they are, like culture itself, a necessary means of man's self-fulfillment.

The deaccession (removal) of items from a collection involves assessment of an item's significance or value to that collection. Conservators aid this curatorial decision-making process by providing expert advice on the item's condition. Six case studies involving the ‘gross deterioration' of plastics were examined from Museums Victoria's deaccession record, for information that illuminates how an object's material condition affects its perceived significance. A further eight case studies included commentary on the condition of plastic components, even if condition was not a contributing factor to the argument for deaccession. In determining resource allocations for managing plastics in collections, these case studies suggest it may be useful to prioritise preventive interventions for objects made entirely or substantially from at-risk plastics such as cellulose acetate, polyurethane, or rubber; objects that are stand-alone examples of their kind; and objects intended as ‘single use'. Further, for social history collections, deterioration such as yellowing, surface abrasion and hardening may not make a critical difference to an object's value. Change that significantly alters an object’s original shape, such as crumbling or severe distortion, is more likely to result in deaccession.

Preserved specimens in natural science collections have lifespans of many decades and often, several hundreds of years. Specimens must be unambiguously identifiable and traceable in the face of changes in physical location, changes in organisation of the collection to which they belong, and changes in classification. When digitizing museum collections, a clear link must be maintained between the physical specimen itself and the information digitally representing that specimen in cyberspace. The idea of a Natural Science Identifier (NSId) as a neutral, unique, universal and stable long-term persistent identifier (PID) of a ‘Digital Specimen’ is central to museums’ ambitions for widening access. An NSId allows easy identification and referencing of specific Digital Specimens, regardless of type, location, owner or user. It provides a digital doorway to physical specimens through which services for arranging loans and visits can be accessed, as well as opening the door to innovative services for manipulating specimens’ information directly; for work reliant upon discovery of related third-party information; and for demanding 3D modelling and visualization of specimens. Because the work takes place within e-Infrastructures/Cyberspace, new possibilities for analysing hundreds of thousands of specimens simultaneously are opened by exploiting large-scale cloud computing capacity and deep mining/machine learning, for example. There are several established identifier mechanisms that could be used as a basis for NSId, but some variant of Handles is most appropriate over the very long-term because of their neutrality, resistance to change and sustainability. Adopted uses of the Handle system include identification of journal articles and datasets in education and research (using Digital Object Identifiers); film and television programme assets in the entertainment sector; financial derivatives; and for international shipping and construction. Aside from being stable and sustained over time, an essential requirement of a global PID mechanism is independence from the museums/institutions assigning identifiers. NSIds are opaque insofar as no information can or should be inferred solely by inspecting the identifier. Stakeholders change, collections move, and organisations evolve, merge or disappear. Even designations and descriptions of specimens and collections can change. Information should only be revealed when the identifier is resolved via a neutral index. One can debate the most appropriate instantiation of the Handle system but this is not useful. Relevance, ease of use and added-value of the supporting ‘NSId Registry’ (NSIdR) – the index of the different kinds of natural science object and their relations – are the decisive factors. This can be seen from the example of the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) founded by the major motion picture studios to create a reliable way to identify and track film and TV content distribution. Focus on the object model, promotional branding and value perception in the target user segment are the critical factors for success. Providing such a registry, seamlessly coupled to work practices and language of the professionals addresses the last mile challenge (Koureas et al. 2016). From specimens, class characteristics, storage containers and collections, to specific identifications, images, naming, literature references and more, the NSIdR’s triple-hierarchy object model, rooted in OBO Foundry’s Biological Collections Ontology, is the key to persistently identifying, relating and indexing the entire range of collection objects of interest to scientists and others working in the bio and geo realms. The NSIdR ‘knowledge graph’, interoperable with other identifier schemes, supports novel first- and third-party value-add services such as arranging loans and visits, curation and annotation, and machine-learning for relationship discovery and pattern exploration.

This paper presents the correlative imaging of collagen denaturation by nonlinear optical microscopy (NLO) and nanoscale infrared (IR) spectroscopy to obtain morphological and chemical information at different length scales. Such multiscale correlated measurements are applied to the investigation of ancient parchments, which are mainly composed of dermal fibrillar collagen. The main issue is to characterize gelatinization, the ultimate and irreversible alteration corresponding to collagen denaturation to gelatin, which may also occur in biological tissues. Key information about collagen and gelatin signatures is obtained in parchments and assessed by characterizing the denaturation of pure collagen reference samples. A new absorbing band is observed near the amide I band in the IR spectra, correlated to the onset of fluorescence signals in NLO images. Meanwhile, a strong decrease is observed in Second Harmonic signals, which are a structural probe of the fibrillar organization of the collagen at the micrometer scale. NLO microscopy therefore appears as a powerful tool to reveal collagen degradation in a non-invasive way. It should provide a relevant method to assess or monitor the condition of collagen-based materials in museum and archival collections and opens avenues for a broad range of applications regarding this widespread biological material.

In the nineteenth century, the exchange of anthropological specimens between museum curators and collectors was a widespread practice used to fill gaps in collections. Within the specimen exchange industry, one's ability to exchange required a steady supply of described or catalogued artifacts considered duplicates. Exchanging duplicates allowed anthropological specimens to move through institutional and personal scientific collections over time. Italian zoologist and anthropologist Enrico Giglioli relied on the practice of specimen exchange to build his personal collection of “stone age” tools from Indigenous peoples, sourced from a worldwide network of museums and collectors, including the Smithsonian Institution. As a master negotiator, Giglioli was remarkably successful in procuring valuable specimens from major museum collections. Analyses of the negotiation of exchanges by museum‐based anthropologists reveals the intersection of object value as produced by museums, agents' desire for rare and underrepresented objects, and professional standards of anthropological practice in the late nineteenth century. [exchange and value, duplicate, Smithsonian Institution, Enrico Giglioli]

1. Time Line In 2011: The Agency for Cultural Affairs launched the "Committee for Salvaging Cultural Properties Affected by the 2011 Earthquake off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku and Related Disasters," which included the National Museum of Nature and Science and the National Council of Science Museums as members, but not a scientist team. The committee's activities started focusing on cultural heritage under the "Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties." This Japanese law covers a limited range of cultural heritage, such as artworks and historic properties, but not scientific collections. Conservation of museum collections is clearly stated in the "Museum Act," but there is no emergency response system. NMNS could not react with agility to the disaster at this time. The West Japan Natural History Museum Network (WJNHMN), which is located in Osaka, far from the disaster area, started to seek its own rescue and salvage activities with the Iwate Prefectural Museum, which is located inland of Iwate prefecture and a safe location from tsunamis (Tokyo and Tsukuba also had some damage, especially early on). Iwate Prefectural Museum was also slightly damaged, and suffered from an electric outage and gas shortage. The museum served as a regional rescue center for damaged museums in coastal areas. Salvage activities were started mainly based on personal networks and voluntary activities by many museum workers throughout Japan. Soon after, WJNHMN began collaborating with the Committee, exchanging both information and techniques for stabilisation and restoration of natural history materials. In 2014: After the major stabilization process had ceased, the Committee was reformed as the "Cultural Heritage Disaster Risk Management Network Promotion Council" and their membership expanded to encompass the conservation of a wider range of cultural and natural heritage properties from disasters. WJNHMN and The Japanese Council of University Museums joined as formal members. The Council is made up of professional organizations in various fields and cooperates in gathering information and providing joint rescue activities. In 2016: The earthquake in Kumamoto prefecture damaged the Kumamoto City Museum (2017), Aso Volcano Museum and several other small museums. At first, local government lacked information about natural history collections, but it turned out that most were safe. In 2020: The Council developed "Disaster Response Guidelines" to expand conservation targets, to aid local government officials. In the guideline, natural history collections are clearly defined as their conservation target. The Cultural Heritage Disaster Risk Management Center, Japan was established to serve as the Council's headquarters. In 2021: During the flooding of the Kuma-River in Hitoyoshi, Kumamoto, 32,000 herbarium sheets were soaked by muddy water at the Hitoyoshi Castle History Museum. At the direction of the Council, the National Museum of Nature and Science, and WJNHMN coordinated and distributed the specimens to 35 institutions across the country within a month (Ebihara and Sakuma 2024). In 2024: Initially after the earthquake of Noto-Peninsula, there was no news of damage to natural history collections. However, six months later, one of the local museums had to move its collection to another place. 2. Current challenges and targets The Council improved the disaster response step by step. We have identified some challenges for further improvement of disaster preparedness of Japanese natural history collections and museums. Preparation for initial activities. Some academic societies had discussed the guidelines for emergency financial support to react to disasters. In the case of rescue works of 2011, there were no supporting funds for natural history, which relied entirely on the voluntary initiatives of institutes, museums and individuals. We obtained support from private funds after the flooding of 2021. With the activities of the reformed Council, information about the damaged museums and properties were communicated soon after the disasters, among those in the organization, which was a much improved response compared to the 2011 earthquake (Sakuma 2017). Materials reserved for specimen rescue (e.g., cardboard boxes, freezer bags, oxygen absorber, ethanol) and advanced funding, are key to a more rapid initial response and for better conservation. Storage deficit. Many specimens are stored in unstable conditions in many museums, with poor documentation and inventory, which makes it difficult to salvage and rescue items once disaster happens. Lack of understanding of the value of natural history collections by local governments, administrative personnel, and local cultural property personnel delays time-sensitive responses to disasters in both in the damaged area, as well as in the area where rescue and salvage teams are dispatched. This understanding needs to be developed before the disaster, at both the administrative level and by citizens. Support for the restoration process. After a disaster, there are some issues related to the re-building of museums and resumption of their activities, which are difficult, even though specimens are undamaged. This is especially difficult if there is no museum curator to support these activities. In the case of the Rikuzentakata City Museum, many supporters and museums provided assistance during its reopening process. Preparation for initial activities. Some academic societies had discussed the guidelines for emergency financial support to react to disasters. In the case of rescue works of 2011, there were no supporting funds for natural history, which relied entirely on the voluntary initiatives of institutes, museums and individuals. We obtained support from private funds after the flooding of 2021. With the activities of the reformed Council, information about the damaged museums and properties were communicated soon after the disasters, among those in the organization, which was a much improved response compared to the 2011 earthquake (Sakuma 2017). Materials reserved for specimen rescue (e.g., cardboard boxes, freezer bags, oxygen absorber, ethanol) and advanced funding, are key to a more rapid initial response and for better conservation. Storage deficit. Many specimens are stored in unstable conditions in many museums, with poor documentation and inventory, which makes it difficult to salvage and rescue items once disaster happens. Lack of understanding of the value of natural history collections by local governments, administrative personnel, and local cultural property personnel delays time-sensitive responses to disasters in both in the damaged area, as well as in the area where rescue and salvage teams are dispatched. This understanding needs to be developed before the disaster, at both the administrative level and by citizens. Support for the restoration process. After a disaster, there are some issues related to the re-building of museums and resumption of their activities, which are difficult, even though specimens are undamaged. This is especially difficult if there is no museum curator to support these activities. In the case of the Rikuzentakata City Museum, many supporters and museums provided assistance during its reopening process.

Violence