This is an edited version of my closing keynote for the Victorian Museums and Galleries Forum on 18 May 2022.
This long read on the pathways and trails found in and through collections is based on my recent keynote presentation at the 2019 Research Applications in Information and Library Studies (RAILS) Conference, Towards Critical Information Research, Education & Practice, hosted by the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University (28-29 October 2019).
For as long as there have been museums some have been concerned by the lack of information available to the public. In 1784, William Hutton was aggrieved when he found the British Museum showed objects with no context, and little more than their names attached. This piece, based on a presentation given to the 2017 National Digital Forum in Wellington, NZ, argues that we need to work toward an expanded view of collection description and documentation, one which encompasses rich connectivity, relationality, and the complex structures required to represent contemporary understandings of collections-based knowledge.
This long read (c2700 words) is a version of the paper I gave at the CIDOC2017 Conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, on 26 September 2017.
Collections in large museums and archives are not uniformly documented. Museums Victoria (MV), in Melbourne, Australia, holds around 17 million items, including natural history specimens, history and technology artefacts, and Indigenous cultures, as well as archives and a library. Parts of the collections are rarely seen, let alone used. Documentation for some of these lesser items has changed little since the days of catalogue cards, the same data simply migrated from system to system for decades without being edited or updated.
© 2024 Context Junky — Powered by WordPress
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑