Cataloguing Culture - Paperback Book - Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation - by Hannah Turner - 9780774863933 - University of British Columbia Press

Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism operates in museum bureaucracies. Using the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as her reference, Hannah Turner organizes her study by the technologies framing museum work over two hundred years: field records, the ledger, the card catalogue, the punch card, and eventually the database. She examines how categories were applied to ethnographic material culture and became routine throughout federal collecting institutions.