Description
Book SynopsisIn examining how the technologies of museum bureaucracy – the ledger book, the card catalogue, the database – operate through a colonial lens,
Cataloguing Culture shines a light on access to and the return of Indigenous cultural heritage.
Trade Review"Turner’s work highlights important historical and contemporary considerations about a specific area of museological practice which has often been neglected in the field of museum studies and material culture."
-- Heather George, University of Waterloo * Ontario Historical Society Review *
Turner has made an important contribution in reminding museum professionals and museum enthusiasts alike that institutional memory in all its physical forms can shape collective memory in unexpected ways: museum collections document not only the lives and cultures of their “subjects,” but also those of museum staff, whose interests and biases underlie even the most mundane of museological practices. -- Forrest Pass, Curator, Exhibitions and Online Content at Library and Archives Canada * The Ormsby Review *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction: “The Making of Specimens Eloquent”
1 Writing Desiderata: Defining Evidence in the Field
2 On the Margins: Paper Systems of Classification
3 Ordering Devices and Indian Files: Cataloguing Ethnographic Specimens
4 Pragmatic Classification: The Routine Work of Description after 1950
5 Object, Specimen, Data: Computerization and the Legacy of Dirty Data
Conclusion: A Museum Data Legacy for the Future
Notes; Bibliography; Index
