Funded under an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) partnership development grant Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship will investigate the temporal and spatial legacy of M. Dorothy George’s landmark Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum which underlies the related catalogue data at the Lewis Walpole Library and the British Museum. The project aims to open “new and important directions for computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues” and to realize “their potential as valuable resources for cross-disciplinary research into curatorial practice, and for enhancing access to and analysis of collections at scale.” The project will produce an empirical account of curatorial voice, define enduring legacies of curatorial labor and produce training materials and reports to develop sectoral capability in digital scholarship. (For further details see the project Githug page at https://cataloguelegacies.github.io/ )
The project is led by James Baker, Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex. The project co-investigator is Rossitza Atanassova, a Digital Curator in the British Library’s Digital Scholarship Department. Also participating are Andrew Salway, Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, and from the Lewis Walpole Library, Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, who is a Principle Investigator at Yale for the project, and Ellen Cordes, Head of Technical Services. We are grateful to Yukari Sugiyama, in Resource Discovery Services: Metadata Management at the Yale University Library… for her assistance in extracting data from the Lewis Walpole Library online records.
by Cynthia Roman