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 their creation and implementation, the evolution of recording systems from paper records to the database, and finally, how the legacy data they contain reinscribes the colonial knowledge they represent.Cultural heritage professionals and administrators in museums are well acquainted with the idea that documentation increases the scholarly and cultural values of museum objects. Catalogue information gives credence and authority to museum items as bearers of cultural and scientific knowledge. Object documentation and records not only describe artifacts in museum collections, but they are also essential in collection management and object discovery. Since the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), as Turner noted, the data stored in museum ledgers, card catalogues, and databases have become essential to the pursuit of repatriation. Inscribed in documentation records created in the era of salvage anthropology,1 however, are paternalistic and racist attitudes that, as Turner effectively argues, have been transmitted to the present day. Thus, the book intervenes by unpacking the colonial underpinnings of museum recording and representational tools and the legacy data in them. It does so by tracing the evolution of how object information is recorded beginning in the field site, how data in ledgers and catalogues are transcribed, distilled, organized, and classified from one format to another in the intervening years, thus extending the very colonial knowledge imbedded in them.Scholars and professionals in the fields of information science, digital curation, archives and museum studies, museum anthropology, and colonial history will find this book highly engaging and insightful. The book analyzes a range of related representational tools: field collecting guides and circulars, bound ledger books, card catalogues and the classification systems that govern their organization. As analogue data from these paper-based media are stored on punch cards and in more modern databases, Turner painstakingly describes and contrasts the relative affordances of representational devices, how their layouts and fields advanced the formalization of racist categories and biased depiction of Indigenous cultures. With cultural institutions digitizing their catalogue and descriptive records, while digital humanists are adopting computational techniques to interpret museum data, as the field of data curation develops more ways to preserve and provide access to object metadata, and as archivists embark in reparative description or redescription, it is important to reckon with the disturbing colonial histories of recording practices.Although Turner rightly notes instances of community resistance to offensive and racist museum data, these are outside the scope of the book. A future work could expand on community responses to museum legacy data: manifestations of Indigenous acts of resistance to flawed and racist terms or categories; the negotiation between Native communities and the Smithsonian Institution; or how community-based organization implement their own descriptive practices after repatriation. It would be beneficial to examine how the guidelines and circulars that shaped ethnological field collecting compare with other similar efforts for botanical and zoological specimens.I began reading this book while initiating a project to develop and implement decolonial and anti-racist policies and practices around the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan. Reading it has taught me that it is crucial to begin by scrutinizing the museums’ most evident knowledge infrastructure: the catalogue. Catalogue systems, standardized nomenclatures, data encoding, and databases that have historically been the sources and symbols of authority are flawed, and these flaws are evident in the formats and structures of those tools. Largely initiated by white men and the unacknowledged work of women,2 with zero-to-minimal community input, the data in these systems perpetuate colonial categories and influence community access and repatriation work.This book is convincing in its arguments that museum documentation contributes more to museum work than is immediately apparent and that object description is not an impartial bureaucratic procedure. As Turner puts it, cataloguing actions are part of the mechanism to turn objects into specimens. Over time, the fixed structure and format of catalogue records have normalized and stabilized biased colonial ideas and ideologies as authoritative knowledge about Indigenous cultures. As communities increasingly gain access to their own collections in Western museums through digitally enabled environments, Turner points out that privileging the museum’s legacy data over Indigenous knowledge can be profoundly insulting when creators are confronted frequently with incorrect and problematic information.Cataloguing Culture demonstrates how museum collections, like those at NMNH, are not neutral and why this is apparent by focusing on one area of museum practice. In reading this book, be prepared to be troubled by early practices of collecting, particularly efforts to collect Indigenous human remains, and how this legacy manifests in tangible forms in museum catalogues and databases. For those interested in repatriation, especially regarding how records are mobilized in this process, this book offers an insight and critical information on the potential and limitations of these records. This is also a book for those interested in understanding how colonialism manifests in the mundane, quotidian systems of museums. It offers persuasive arguments and analytical perspectives for those seeking to understand the practices of museum recordkeeping, documentation, and cataloging or classification, and how these are important aspects of knowledge production and colonization.