Iam lucky enough to work with a fantastic and complex museum collection. My job is to make sense of the jumble resulting from centuries of collecting and incomplete historical records, and then attempt to collect the records with the objects. Through recording or cataloguing items, we can piece stories together, make connections and gradually make order out of the chaos of human experience.
Museums have not always been meticulous about their recordkeeping. Those that began collecting in the 1800s or earlier are unlikely to have much information, making any cataloguing very tricky.
When most people think about museum cataloguing, they conjure up images of dusty rooms and faded old cards in a filing cabinet. This is now far from the truth, and recently museums have completely changed what cataloguing should be. Instead of the idea that a curator’s word was somehow final and beyond reproach, the current
