This week’s readings brought me back to my studies abroad at the University of Sussex in England. After completing an economics course to fulfill requirements for my UCLA major, I had the choice of many intriguing electives for the second half of the summer session. One class in particular, titled “Museums & Material Culture,” stood out, so I decided to give it a shot. Other than weekly field trips to museums around the country, we spent class time focusing on how curators make decisions on which objects to display, and how to classify them into different categories. As soon as I started to dive into the article “Classification and its Structures,” it reminded me of this museums course. Sperberg-McQueen defined ‘classification’ as having the purpose to first of all group together objects with shared properties, coupled with the ability to distinguish between things “which are different in ways relevant to the purpose of the classification.” This definition brought back memories of our field trip to the British Museum in London, where a curator sat us down and gave us a lesson on how they classify their massive collection of objects. While my time browsing objects in museums was spent looking at physical collections instead of digital images, both pertained to deciding what information is relevant, along with taking into account how information can be divided, and the long-term implications of decisions made by a curator, which is similar to someone who sorts out a digital archive.
As I continued to read through the articles, I kept thinking of the curator at the British Museum. Annie Gilliland’s article “Setting the State,” which focuses on the increasing amount of metadata available, reminded me of the vast database the museum boasts. Back in 1998, the British Museum began to put its massive collection online, which allowed viewers to click through about 260,000 exhibits (link). Now that the museum’s collection has expanded to eight million objects, the database has grown accordingly. The process of information analytics is utilized to produce the metadata, which can be worked on in order to find similarities between various objects.
Meticulous attention to the creation of metadata has become crucial in today’s digitally obsessed world, paired with the vast expansion of digitally accessible information. With a collection that is commonly regarded as the largest and most comprehensive in the world, careful systematic utilization of metadata has proved to be of the highest importance for the British Museum.