Shape of storage memory: A digital analysis of the museums’ storage of Northeast Europe

Abstract

Objects in museums’ storage constitute “storage memory” that sets the limits to our knowledge and interpretation of the past. Spread out across thousands of institutions, it has been inaccessible for empirical inquiry until recently. Theoretically, the digitization of museum catalogs allows the uniting of dispersed containers of institutional data into a vast connected digital archive, turning “storage memory” from a theoretical concept into an empirically explorable phenomenon. The study examines national digitized museum catalogs of three countries—Latvia, Estonia, and Finland—with a two-fold purpose: first, to explore if and how they can be used to produce a structural overview of the storage memories of each of the three included countries, both separately and in combination; second, by documenting the process of exploration, to examine critically how these new digital data collections are structured and formatted and to what extent they allow to transgress institutional and national boundaries.