1 Inventory Overview
In 2022, Craig encountered a collection’s database that accumulated over at least 5 years with more than 100 individuals either creating or updating records. Prior to Otto, most digital inventory appears to have been ad hoc or project based and was not systematic in scope or coverage. Based on information housed in the database, different curators appear to have had their own approaches to museum registration and database use. Likewise, students often entered data inconsistently and sometimes with high rates of typographical errors. As a consequence of idiosyncratic data logging, some ares of the Museum were well inventoried and others not. Even when there were digital records, information was spread throughout the database making it cumbersome to use.
Otto secured external support to systematically inventory the Museum’s entire ethnographic and historic collection. Johnson was the graduate student who completed most of the inventory work under IMLS support. Harper completed additional inventory work under NMHC support. Craig supervised inventory efforts during the final months of both grants and wrote the reporting documents for each. This portion of Craig’s outgoing report describes a bit of what he learned about the history of the University Museum collection database and elaborates on what he did to it as Interim Curator. The primary emphases are cleaning or “wrangling” (Wickham and Grolemund 2017) inventory data (Chapter 2) and presenting inventory data to the public (Chapter 3) following data visualization best practices (Tufte 1997, 2006).