Navigating Networks and Developing Practice: People and Biography in the British Museum Collection Database

Museums and museum documentation are oriented around objects.

But museums also need to document, research and tell stories about the people who made, found, owned or exchanged objects. This project explores the history, challenges and potential of documenting people in museum databases.

Shared challenges include the variable quality and coverage of legacy data about people, and the limitations of current data structures, shaped by years of cataloguing practice, both paper-based and digital.

Museum databases are not neutral: their structures, emphases and silences perpetuate inequalities and ways of thinking that may be discriminatory, colonial and exclusionary.

There is enormous potential to enrich data, address legacy terminology, increase representation, and mobilize person records as powerful connectors between people, objects, places, events and documentary evidence.

The British Museum Person Authority is the key research resource for this project, containing over 200,000 records for people connected with the museum's objects. The student will research and critique the BM's historic and contemporary practice, relating to cataloguing people.

They will develop new best practice, while enriching knowledge of the networks of people connected with the museum's archaeological collections.

The student will identify a suitable set of person records to use as a case study, within the supervisors' expertise (archaeology of the Classical Mediterranean world, Middle East, Central and South Asia). This BM case study will make important contributions to wider practice.

The student will relate it to current research and evolving practice in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector and wider digital landscape and will develop and disseminate recommendations for cataloguing people.

The project will provide the researcher with a strong foundation for a career in museums and/or archaeological research, combining subject-related research with extensive practical experience in digital cataloguing.

Research questions include: How has the British Museum evolved its strategy for documenting the biographies and networks of people surrounding its collection? And how does that relate to wider sectoral practice? How do users of the British Museum collection database experience and navigate data relating to people?

What problems do they perceive and what changes do they want to see?

How can people and the connections and relationships between them, and between people and other data (e.g. places or themes), be better recorded and made more retrievable in the British Museum database? What are the implications of this work, both for future research and for cataloguing practice in the wider sector?