New book reveals the challenges of documenting collections in the digital era

A new book by Dr Mike Jones, a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ANU School of History provides the first interdisciplinary study of the digital documentation of artefacts and archives.

When we think about computers and institutional collections, we might think of how services like Trove have replaced the days of microfilm and card catalogues.

Intuitively we think of digitisation and the internet as making things more accessible, and there’s no doubt technology has done this. But how this technology is being used by collecting institutions raises a number of issues about how we document collections, how we ensure collections are interoperable, and how collection reflect disciplines and culture.

“Most contemporary collections and digital systems are too fragmented to support the ways in which people work with and understand collections,” says Dr Mike Jones, a researcher in the ANU School of History. Dr Jones’ new book Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum released by Routledge

“Though one of the strengths of digital technology is its ability to capture links between things—the web being the most familiar example—many of the splits between disciplines and professions have remained, or even been reinforced. Artefacts, artworks, publications, and archives are often described using different systems and standards, and collection items are often documented without explicit links to related material held elsewhere in the same institution. It is as though physical storage and disciplinary perspectives continue to dictate how material is described digitally, rather than using technology to overcome some of the limitations of these siloed approaches.”

The consequences of these widespread issues affect curators of collections and researchers using the collections. For the curator of a collection, they may become responsible for a labyrinth of materials and items, with few if any documented processes to help navigate it. And as with the researcher trying to access the materials in that collection, they may all find themselves searching and navigating the many complex links through the collection, that have likely been unearthed by those searching before. It’s a burden to research and an inefficiency to be overcome.

Beyond time and resources, the problems posed by the fragmentation of collections and how they may reinforce traditional disciplinary boundaries, poses a particular issue for First Nations history.

“The divisions we see between disciplines and professions are founded in European knowledge systems, dividing up the world according to classification structures with specific cultural and intellectual roots,” says Dr Jones.

“As Margo Neale from the National Museum of Australia explains in her recent book Songlines (2020), Aboriginal knowledges are not compartmentalised into disciplines, but combines humanities and science, history and culture, story and context. Implementing more relational, polyvocal approaches to collections documentation will open up new possibilities for documenting First Nations culture and history in ways that better reflect these knowledge systems.”

Anyone who has spent time with computers will know the frustration of trying opening a file we don’t have the software for. Computing is filled with different formats and ways of writing code, though of course there are many examples of widely adopted standards to avoid such problems. Interoperability remains a significant issue in the cultural sector. Dr Jones offers the example in the book of anthropologist Donald Thomson, who collected extensive artefacts and natural history specimens, recorded copious reflections, capture photographs and published expansively in academic publications. These resources are held in different systems, making it hard to bring them together.

“These systems can’t speak to each other, it becomes very difficult to bring together all the elements you need to understand his work or the meaning of the items he collected and described,” says Dr Jones. “While there are standards that support the building of relationships between these various records, if a system can’t access—or even see—data in another system this becomes a very manual, clunky process.”

The solution to these issues requires institutions to reconceptualise how they document collections, leaving behind discrete types of records and traditional singular approaches. Rather, collections in the future need to recognise the complex links between collections items, and the rich story born of understanding the relationship between them.

“Doing so will better preserve the complexities of collections-based knowledge, and support more diverse and culturally appropriate methods that will benefit a wide range of users and user communities.”