Cataloging History: Revisualizing the 1853 New York Crystal Palace (original) (raw)

Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues

This article introduces a special issue on the topic of museum documentation and knowledge production. The articles in this issue address the history of museum catalogues and position the documentation of material culture as a historical epistemological practice. Each article examines how cataloguing practices have evolved over time and how the categorization or classification of ethnographic material culture often depends on specific individuals or preexisting scientific standards. This issue engages critically with emergent discussions concerning the formalization of knowledge about ethnographic material culture as it emerged in the nineteenth century. These articles also contribute to theoretical discussions that consider the material practices of knowledge production and the affective relations that shape this information. As a whole, this issue gives unique insights into how museums have documented material culture through time and provides a way of thinking about how we might engage with such historical practices that still impact much of our present work.

‘Universal ’ access in 3000 years? Digital Collections of the State Hermitage Museum

Educating and engaging museum audience in contemporary times is becoming imperative, considering the persistent information society which has created the need for museums to utilise new methods of disseminating information. Digitisation has therefore become the new instrument for access and preservation in museums. However, the process of digitisation has brought about many challenges for museums. Hence, the most problematic issue apart from the funding is how to decide what to be digitised in the first instance amongst the wide range of collections.

Digital Futures II: Museum Collections, Documentation, and Shifting Knowledge Paradigms

Collections, 2004

Documentation forms the basis in which museum collections are ascribed meaning. Practices, many of which are rooted in nineteenth century empiricist modes of thinki ng, have not been revised at the speed that ideological, practical, and tech nological transformations are taking place in other areas of museum practice. At this point an op portunity exists fo r radical changes not only in the manner objects are documented, but also the way they are perceived as forms of evidence. This article, drawing on the findings of the Knowledge Objects project and the writing of leading museum theorists, and historians revisits the acquisition and documentation process. It proposes the incorporation of new principles, practices, and structures that acknowledge objects as polysemic entities-as holding multiple meanings; the meaning of narratives and classificatory systems as products of cultural, disciplinary, museum, and curatorial opinion; the role of a diverse range of users in the cycle of knowledge making and the responsibilities of curators and collection managers as knowledge experts and brokers.

Digital Art History and the Museum: The Online Scholarly Collection Catalogues at the Art Institute of Chicago

Visual Resources, 2019

This article considers the various ways that the Art Institute of Chicago's digital scholarly collection catalogues engage with art history in the digital realm. Since 2009, when the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) was invited by the Getty Foundation to participate with a group of other museums to create a platform for museum collection catalogues online, the AIC has been a leader in this growing field. The digital platform we designed has proven to be the ideal vehicle to present our research in a dynamic manner. Through several case studies, we will demonstrate how these publications have not only made contributions to the field of digital art history through the presentation of primary archival source material online, but have also facilitated the incorporation of digital art history into our methodological toolbox. This paper also discusses the challenges of digital publishing as compared to more traditional, print-based workflows.

Striving to Persist: Museum Digital Exhibition and Digital Catalogue Production

2019

Although museum automation emerged in the mid-1960s, American and British art museums continue to have a difficult relationship with digital technology. Indeed, within the broader cultural heritage network, art museums have been particularly reluctant to disseminate their missions online. Particularly since the eighteenth century, art museums have remained beholden to certain perceptions of authority that are tied to the authentic object. Yet, as new technologies offer more efficient and cost-effective ways to store and disseminate information and promise greater accessibility, these museums have continued in their efforts to incorporate digital methods into their practices. The following document considers the role of information organization in the creation of knowledge and value within and beyond the space of the art museum by interrogating two major scholarly products of the well-endowed, early 21st century Western art museum’s ecosystem: online catalogues and online exhibitions...

Digital Humanities in the Memory Institution: The Challenges of Encoding Sir Hans Sloane’s Early Modern Catalogues of His Collections

Open Library of Humanities, 2019

Catalogues are the core documents of museum structure and meaning. Yet no significant computational analysis has been made of how catalogues from the early modern period are constructed or of the way their structure and content relate to the world from which collections are assembled. The Leverhulme-funded ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s catalogues of his collections’ (2016–19), a collaboration between the British Museum and University College London, with contributing expertise from the British Library and the Natural History Museum, seeks to change this. The Enlightenment Architectures project is analysing Sloane’s original manuscript catalogues of his collections to understand their highly complex information architecture and intellectual legacies. In this article we explore some of the challenges of seeking to integrate the methods of digital humanities with those of cataloguing, inventory, curatorial and historical studies and of bringing such interdisciplinary approaches to bear on early modern documentary sources. We do this through two case studies that highlight the approaches to encoding Sloane’s catalogues in TEI that Enlightenment Architectures has employed and the major challenges that these have brought to the fore.

Revealing an Unknown Museum and Its Collection Using Digital Tools: The Palazzo DI Giustizia in Milan

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2021

Abstract. The paper presents the generation of an interactive cataloging system for the Courthouse of Milan (Palazzo di Giustizia) and more than one hundred artworks stored in the building. The courthouse is an “unknown museum” in the city and represents a masterpiece of the architectural and figurative culture in the '30s. The online system developed in the project aims at solving a twofold task. First, it must present the "unknown museum" to citizens through a simple and effective online website. Second, it must serve as a repository for technical information not available to the public and only limited to the specialists in conservation. This second section includes catalog forms produced according to specific national standards for artworks, which require a variety of information such as size, material, artist, state of conservation, and description of previous restorations and interventions. The catalog, supported by the development of a preventive conservation pl...

Archives of the Commons: Collective Cataloguing in Art Museums

Intervención, Revista Internacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museología, 2020

In this article, we argue the need for documentation centers in contemporary art museums to use cataloguing processes, in particular, and information management, in general, to build new audiences and to create communities of sense around their collections. The starting question is how to make catalographic description a channel for collaboration that connects all involved parties: archivists, artists, curators, art critics, activists, researchers, other related professionals, and even visitors, both inside and outside of the museum. Taking the category of conceptual art as a case study, this research analyses the effectiveness of social tagging tools used by standardized cataloguing models.