New Open Access Book Chapter: “Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice”
Hannah Turner, Reese Muntean, and Kate Hennessy have published a chapter titled “Making and stewarding digital collections: case studies and concerns” in the newly published and open-access book “Collections Mangement as Critical Museum Practice”, edited by Cara Krmpotich and Alice Stevenson. You can download the PDF of the book or purchase a hard copy at UCL Press.
From the introduction to their chapter:
“Museums and cultural institutions have been working with and collecting born digital and digitised object data for nearly 50 years. Discourse in academic communities that study the management, access to, and return of collections and their documentation has engaged with issues in both the practical work of the care of collections and digitisation, and how this intersects with repatriation or the return of objects and belongings to communities of origin (Bell 2015; Bell, Christen and Turin 2013; Christen 2011). The practice of making and remaking copies is not new (Frazier 1973; Hollinger 2022; Risdonne et al. 2022); but the amount of data management and questions for stewarding digital collections is. As museum practitioners and scholars we are interested in the questions that the management of this digital information raises about the kinds of objects that are created – in anthropology, museum practice, contemporary art, and beyond. We contend that this is a reframing of old ideas about ‘digital preservation’ and ‘documentation’ toward an ethic of how we can care for digital cultural heritage, digitised belongings, and all of the ways in which our institutions, technologies and awareness must continue to shift practice (Hou et al. 2022). These debates are closely connected to concepts of intellectual property (especially the intellectual property regime imposed by a colonial, settler-state) and digital sovereignty, a call to extend the boundaries of Indigenous protocols and rights into web-based or computerised spaces (Fragnito et al. 2019; Sharma 2022; Wemigwans 2018).
This paper plots one case study, the digitisation of a mask at the Museum of Vancouver in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to address the complexities of what is at stake when museums are tasked with caring for the mp3 files, full-size digital images, rendered models and metadata that make up digital records. We, three settler academics and a digital designer, were tasked by the museum to help the museum capture a mask as a document of its condition at a point in time. We provided the technical services as the museum worked through their own process of repatriation and shared stewardship of digital records, work that is always ongoing (Fortney 2020). We encourage readers to view this not as a laudation of museum methods or the inherent right of institutions to keep objects, belongings and data as records; but rather a document of a moment in time in the history of what we hope is a trajectory toward more examples of transferred ownership and control. We also want to suggest that museum work is moored in colonial relations which extend far beyond the control of individual museum staff: colonial structures like capitalism, extraction, and pollution run very deep and are harmful (Liboiron 2021). We do believe however, especially as settler academics, that we are responsible for understanding and doing the least harm we can in these reparative processes, but acknowledge this is a difficult and nearly impossible task (Moreton-Robinson 2015). We want to acknowledge that our careers, and hopefully other scholars and practitioners, will benefit from the shared analysis in the publication of this book.