Anne Nagrant wrote:
>
>
> what if the cataloguer is wrong?
Good point, though it veers this thread off in another direction. It
seems to me that part of responsible cataloguing is knowing what you
don't know and if ever guessing so indicate. My convention is to use
"(?)" after anything that I'm not completely sure about, because
someone's educated guess is probably better than nothing when you're
trying to ferret out information buried in a collection. At least it's a
clue. Nobody can know it all, and we all have to build on what has been
observed by others and add our own knowledge to the total effort.
>
>
> In the example of Slavic immigrants at the turn of the century, the same
> person could have a multitude of "identities"--as anyone who has tried to
> trace geneologies knows. Let's take a person raised in a Carpatho-Rusyn
> (a Slavic group) village located in present-day Slovakia, but at the time
> of immigration was a part of the Austria-Hungary empire. Their
> documentation may list their ethnicity as Austria-Hungarian, Rusyn,
> Slovak, or Russian. What if "Russian" is inadvertantly (and somewhat
> inaccurately) listed in the museum's catalogue for this individual? How
> does this help future researchers of, say, Carpatho-Rusyn immigration?
>
There are many such examples. I know a man who was a citizen of 3
different countries before he was 18 and had never moved from his home
town. But those were political boundaries, not cultural.
Thus, an additional data field for provenance is obviously a necessity
and I can't imagine that there are any museum catalogues that don't have
one. Using an example I'm more familiar with, there are many ethnic
Hungarians in present day Romania, so you would use "Hungarian" as the
cultural classification and "Romania" for provenance.
> Obviously there are many complicated issues at hand here, and I do not
> offer a perfect solution for my own example. I would like to see a
> catalogue description that is as specific as possible, for the ease of the
> researcher and for the sake of accuracy.
While accuracy is important, in cases like this, using a broader term
(such as "Slavic" in your example), seems to make sense because it will
lump that item with others that are related. I actually favor using the
broader term followed by the more specific term. e.g. "Slavic -
Carpatho-Rusyn" or "Native American - Maidu". That way people looking
for the broader or the specific can find it easily.
>
> I caution strongly the museum worker who must make the decision of which
> identity to list, however, lest uninformed choices be made!
I concur completely. I've seen some cataloguing done by volunteers in
small and not so small museums that is either seriously lacking or
pretty inventive. But this simply raises the question of the
professionalism of a museum, who they hire or who works as a volunteer
cataloguer, as well as how cataloguers are trained and supervised.
> This could also apply to the Chinese v Chinese-American example: with only
> a photograph and scant data concerning it, how can one accurately
> ascertain the culture being portrayed?
Cataloguing usually does not take place in a vacuum. I think that, for
sake of this discussion, we have to assume that the cataloguer would
have at least some information about or context for what it being
catalogued or the collection would not have been accepted by the museum
in the first place. So, for instance, you would know that the collection
of items in which the photo was found belonged to the donor's great
uncle John Doe who was a railroad surveyor in the west in the 1880's.
In addition, the cataloguer (hopefully) has knowledge of the subjects
dealt with by her or his museum, and would know the general
circumstances and history of the peoples of the area they are dealing
with. (e.g. where and how the Chinese laborers of the area lived). And
if the cataloguer is a novice or a volunteer, presumably they are being
supervised by someone who does have these kinds of knowledge and can
help them.
Lucy Sperlin
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