Artefacts, archives, and documentation in the relational museum

Abstract

on classification and hierarchies of various kinds to describe their holdings by type and function. The relational museum offers a solution to the problems delineated within this book. The relational museum can help to break down inherited distinctions by looking at collecting networks and (inter)institutional informational infrastructures for museum collections, and by looking at distributed social, cultural, and evidential networks for archives. The relational museum facilitates complex, processual, plural, multi-vocal, and experi-ential representations of collections. Rather than relying on inherited documentation systems that are becoming dysfunctional and unfit for purpose, concepts taken from social science and Indigenous studies can be used to understand and represent the human experiences embo-died in our collections, such as ecosystems, ‘songlines,’ or ‘weave.’ Archival practice protects and standardizes the relationships between records: a similarly relational focus for museum collections would help to link artefacts together, for example, through potentially linking artefacts to multiple classification systems simultaneously and thereby revealing lost or hitherto unrevealed connections. Archive systems of description typically start with the aggregate/wider picture first, then move to the individual item. Museum systems do precisely the opposite, spending less time on the aggregate dimension. Jones makes the point compel-lingly that the focus of museum documentation needs to change instead to ‘thick descriptions’ that are contextualized, culturally rich, and woven into broader complexes.