Abstract
AbstractThe history of museum collections is also the history of the management of information about these collections. Today, increased access to large amounts of robust collections data requires that information be curated so that is useful for communities and individuals who wish to access it. This has caused scholars and communities to question modes of ordering that do not necessarily map onto their own local and personal understandings of the world. In light of the major pragmatic and intellectual affordances stimulated by information technologies, the inner workings of these systems are often made invisible and act as infrastructures rather than singular or simple tools. By providing a historical account of how information about anthropological museum collections was computerized in the 1970s at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), I consider the museum catalogue as a socio‐technical information infrastructure. From that perspective, I argue that the knowledge produced by modes of inscription such as catalogues is generated by relationships of individuals and technologies. A detailed and critical history of catalogues must take into account these historical socio‐technical infrastructures.
Highlights
The history of museum collections is a history of the management of information about these collections
It has been proposed that the recent “ontological turn” in anthropology and material culture studies is a return to an interest in studying difference as such, a concept that has been a feature of anthropological discourse for some time
It has been argued that theorizing different ontologies is an evasion of the age-old “culture question” across social sciences and humanities disciplines (Carrithers et al 2010; Salmond 2012)
Summary
The history of museum collections is a history of the management of information about these collections. By using specific examples in the Smithsonian Institution’s history, such as the transition from paper-based records to automated computer indexes and the emergence of legacy data, I suggest something that many cataloguers and museum professionals may already experience: that routine cataloging is an intellectual practice and that managing the data held within computer databases is a complex negotiation among technology, history, and epistemology.
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