Profiles of Collection Cataloging & Documentation Efforts by Museums, Archives & Library Special Collections

This study profiles the efforts of five university and/or museum-related institutions to catalog and document their collections; the organizations profiled are: the Pusey House Library at Oxford University in the UK, the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada; the Anthropology Department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC; and the archives of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada.

The report was written by Laura Phillips, formerly Head of Museums Documentation for Qatar Museums and former Collections Manager at the Wolfsonian Museum.  

The 88-page report looks closely at issues and problems relating to provenance, collection documentation, marketing, cataloging and findability, digitization, nomenclature, retrieval and storage mechanics, and includes information on print and other information collections (including digital)  but also, perhaps with even greater emphasis, on artwork, artifacts and other objects of cultural and historic interest.

Each profile includes many of the general themes listed above but also provides its own unique story and themes.  The Shingwauk archives profile, for example, discusses how the Archive develops its own subject heading and archival framework, which it views as more appropriate and descriptive than out-of-the-box content headings. The University of British Columbia’s National Museum of Anthropology relates how a physical move of the museum to a new location became a great opportunity to significantly expand the Museum’s database of cataloging and documentation information about its collections.  At the Peabody Essex Museum, its profile describes the use of a newly implemented workflow management tool and other systems that enable the Museum to, among other things, track flow of collections both inside and, when needed, outside of the building.  The profile the Pusey House library depicts that organization’s efforts to integrate its collection into the main cataloging system of Oxford University, of which it is part.   The profile of the Anthropology collection at the Smithsonian institution’s National Museum of Natural History describes, among many other processes, how corrections to databases are made, and how cataloging practices developed at the Museum and in the Anthropology Department over time.