In late June 2019, Tristram Hunt wrote a piece for The Guardian: ‘Should museums return their colonial artefacts?’
Here I want to focus specifically on museum documentation, viewed through the lens of what is perhaps Hunt’s most problematic statement: “For a museum like the V&A, to decolonise is to decontextualise.” Any examination of museum artefacts online quickly reveals that, when it comes to metadata, missing context is a significant issue, and the concept of decolonisation a valuable part of the solution.
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.
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