museum anthropology
edge of the theories at the foundation of collections
teaching collections management
anthropologically
Cara Krmpotich
university of toronto
abstract
This article documents the creation of a teaching collection
intended to teach and equally interrogate collections man-
agement practices and values to graduate-level museum
studies students. The collection is being used to convey to
students the ways collections management is an embodied
practice and an active area for research. The creation of the
collection is discussed as an iterative process through the
lens of material culture and museum anthropological
analysis, taking into account the objects in the collection,
the practices of collections management, and the interac-
tions between students and the growing collection. The
iterative process is likewise presented in waves of chal-
lenges and partial solutions. [collections management,
material culture, museum anthropology]
My background is in museum anthropology and
material culture studies. I now teach within a
Museum Studies professional master’s program at
the University of Toronto that takes seriously the
interrelatedness of practice and theory and aims to
create students who are “fluent” across multiple
museum roles. The students come from diverse
disciplines including history, archaeology, classics,
biology, literature, art history, and anthropology,
while others are returning to university from profes-
sional positions within museums, galleries, zoos, edu-
cation, contract archaeology, communications,
translation, or other fields. Among the courses I teach
is Collections Management, a required course that
introduces students to the processes that transform
objects into museum artifacts and the long-term
physical and intellectual care of museum collections.
I strive for students to be keenly aware of the people
for whom museums steward collections and the peo-
ple who are affected by collections management
decisions. Within my course, I also want students to
understand collections management as a site for
active research within museums and museum studies.
The course requires students to expand their knowl-
Museum Anthropology, Vol. 38, Iss. 2, pp. 112–122 © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/muan.12087
best practices and the resources available to support
collections activities. It also provides opportunities
for “practice-based learning” so that students’ bodies
will come to know what it feels like to practice collec-
tions management—to embody best and emerging
practices through repetitive physical handling of
museum artifacts and by monitoring one’s bodily
movements within museum spaces. Our bodily inter-
actions with museum collections are distinct from
our interactions with non-museum objects, and it
takes practice and repetition for this manner of work-
ing to become “natural.” Although my students have
various levels of exposure to anthropological
methods and theories, anthropology’s interest in the
relations made through objects and their exchange
(Appadurai 1988; Buchli 2002; Edwards et al. 2006;
Harrison et al. 2013; Strathern 1988), in isolating
cultural epistemologies (Fabian 2007; Moore and
Saunders 2014; Toren and de Pina-Cabral 2011), and
in embodied and engendered cultural practices
(Connerton 1989; Csordas 1990; Latour 2004; Sere-
metakis 1994) creates a strong platform from which
to decenter, question, and, if necessary, rebuild
collections management practices in the museum.
In all my courses, I am influenced by my own col-
lections-based employment and research that
approaches artifacts in museums as potential teachers
—as catalysts for the telling of oral histories, language
and vocabulary, family stories and memories, artistic
techniques, modes of production, historic relations,
and shifting worldviews (Krmpotich and Peers 2011;
Krmpotich and Romanek 2012). However, this
approach comes from a collections perspective more
so than a curatorial perspective. Collections manage-
ment–related practices are increasingly an area of
interest within museum anthropology (Krmpotich
and Peers 2013; Nichols 2014; Swinney 2012; Wing-
field 2013).1 There are ample opportunities for criti-
cal analysis and research, informed by ethnography
and material culture studies, of the daily and “best”
collections practices as well as the material technolo-
gies used in these processes (Latour 2005; Loureiro
2012; Turner 2015). Still, too often collections-based
work flows in museums are not regarded as intellec-
tual labor. There is evidence this is shifting, as the
5th edition of Rebecca Buck and Jean Allman Gil-
more’s (2010) Museum Registration Methods intro-

duces ethical and logistical dilemmas for collections
staff to work through in ways that raise self-awareness
and reflexivity of the institution as a whole, the role of
collections manager in particular, and the relations
among staff and stakeholders. One of my challenges
then is to get students comfortable enough with the
embodied practice of collections management so they
can ask productive questions of it, better appreciate
its affordances and effects, and contribute to emerg-
ing theories and practices of collections care.
This article provides insight into how a teaching
collection intended to teach collections management
practices and values is being built in an iterative fash-
ion through my own material culture and museum
anthropological analysis of the interactions between
students and the growing collection. The iterative
process is presented in waves of challenges and partial
solutions.
Challenges, Part I
When I first arrived in Toronto in 2010, there was no
collection associated with our program. Although
recent trends in museology have encouraged a focus
on people and ideas rather than objects, material cul-
tural studies provide methods for retaining a focus on
objects as a way to explore relationships, values, and
meaning (Dudley 2012). Attempting to teach collec-
tions management without a collection affirmed how
valuable artifacts are to our understanding of the
world—in this case, namely, the museum world.
Although there are various collections at the uni-
versity, none were set up to be a teaching collection
for museum studies students. Historically, the Royal
Ontario Museum (ROM) was the university museum
(see Teather 2005 for a “prehistory” of the ROM).
Our students continue to volunteer, intern, and work
at the ROM and have distinct library privileges there,
but our program has not been embedded in the ROM
since the late 1970s. During my first term teaching
Collections Management, we worked with objects
brought in by students and random (though thought-
fully assembled) objects I could grab from home in
order to try our hand at cataloguing and identifying
preventive conservation concerns and emerging chal-
lenges for the field. Still, the absence of a collection—
of objects distinguished from “everyday life,”
removed from general circulation—was a distinct
challenge in my goal for students to embody collec-
teaching collections management anthropologically
tions management practices. When handling their
own objects brought from home, students rarely
changed their handling behavior. Objects obviously
brought in for a lesson by the students or instructor,
without recorded historic or artistic value, were not
denaturalized enough; students tended not to sus-
pend disbelief in the way necessary for practice-based
learning to be effective. Within minutes, handling
practices and collections behavior began to slide away
from best practices toward everyday material culture
interactions.
Objects brought from students’ homes also tended
to have complete documentary information: owner(s),
circumstances of collection, dates of production and
collection, and rich social histories were almost
always available. This is in stark contrast to an
“average” museum record where gaps in knowledge
are the norm and staff rarely have the ability to simply
turn to a person sitting beside them to fill in those
gaps.
As non-museum objects in a classroom, the
objects did not bear the traces or evidence of museum
processes as fully accessioned museum objects do.
Lacking accession numbers, catalogue entries, storage
mounts, or even a basic signifier like acid-free tissue,
the brought-from-home objects failed to engender
the necessary intellectual and bodily shifts from stu-
dents useful for collections work and its subsequent
theoretical deconstruction.
Making Progress, Part I: Building a
Collection
In early 2011, I began working with Robyn Watt, a
research assistant and then-current Museum Studies
student (who had just experienced collections man-
agement without a collection the term before) to
develop a teaching collection that would help stu-
dents develop collections management skills and
thought processes. While Watt could find ample
resources on how to teach with collections in the
classroom and in the museum (Binns 2008; Efthim
2006; MacFarlan 2001), we found no resources on
how to build a teaching collection nor materials that
spoke about how to select objects to help support the
teaching of collections management.2 Unlike most
education collections, I do not use objects to teach
research methods or the material culture of ethnogra-
phy, art history, or history, whereby students learn to
113
teaching collections management anthropologically
use the objects as traces and evidence of events,
relations, trade, or iconography, for example. Rather,
the collections need to illuminate for students the
rationale and methods of collections documentation
and care. Ideally, the objects will also illuminate the
tensions within best practices, industry standards,
real life, and the ontologies that come into contact
within museums.
Watt assembled a teaching collection from objects
available to us—mostly outdated information
technologies within the Faculty such as typewriters,
camcorders, VHS tapes, DVDs, USB keys, floppy
disks, laptops, photographic negatives, desktop com-
puters, video and audio recorders, radios, 8-track,
digital scanners, cassette tapes, wax cylinders for pho-
nographs, old Kodak cameras, laser printers, exten-
sion cords, and an overhead projector. We also
acquired a spinning wheel, hand-thrown ceramic
jugs, and chintz tea sets to emphasize links between
historic and contemporary technologies and the links
between global object flows past and present.
We tried to select objects for their intellectual
depth and research potential. For example, we chose
objects that are challenging to catalogue or interesting
to condition report; such objects have greater poten-
tial to encourage reflexivity about these processes and
norms. The collection includes objects that are
known to actively or rapidly decompose and degrade,
like different kinds of rubber and plastics. (The col-
lection does not include objects that could be a health
risk to the people handling the collection.) When
choosing objects to include in the collection, we also
considered objects’ social history and biographies. A
seemingly simple box with a light bulb in it speaks to
our reliance on energy sources—a taken-for-granted
element of urban North American life—but also on
global processes of manufacture and distribution: the
packaging of the bulb communicates that it was
designed in Philadelphia, manufactured in Taiwan,
and sold at Home Hardware in Toronto. This object’s
parts travelled great distances before coalescing and
being purchased, not unlike a number of historic and
ethnographic objects in museum collections. Lee Par-
sons (1961) speculates about a club in the collections
of the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, questioning the
exchanges through which a Melanesian club came to
be in the hands of an Iroquois individual who further
114
modified it materially before it was collected by the
Euro-American donor. Likewise, Christine Jones’s
(2013) depiction of an 18th-century tasse trembleuse
reminds us of the deeply historic quality of globaliza-
tion and its influence on design, materials, manners,
and human–object interactions.
Still, we took what we could, largely going for
quantity over quality. Our modest goal was to gather
at least two objects per student; this meant a need to
locate about one hundred objects. In 2013, through
the thoughtfulness and salvage efforts of operations
staff in the Faculty, I further acquired items recovered
from Marshall McLuhan’s Coach House, including a
travel bar, a mysterious steering wheel, and various
examples of mid–20th-century audio recording
devices and media.
The information technologies and Coach House
objects are not “typical” in their form or function to
collections found in civic museums, art galleries, or
ethnographic collections. However, many of these
objects resemble what might be in a collection of the
future: objects that will be historic decades from now;
objects made of materials whose aging properties we
are still learning about; objects not always made by
human hands but by mechanization; or objects that
will require informed decisions about migration and
emulation. There is resonance with current museum
efforts to collect contemporary urban material culture
(see, for example, vol. 37, iss. 1, the special issue of
Museum Anthropology on urban collecting, especially
articles by Clarke [2014], Mullins [2014], and
Rotenberg [2014]). While not necessarily similar in
function or form to archetypal history, ethnography,
or art museum objects, there are similarities in mate-
rials and preservation needs. A number of these
objects, for example, benefit from the same emerging
practices being used to manage new media art. Checks
for corrosive and combustible materials continue to
be essential. The challenge of caring for metals is wide-
spread, and composite objects are the norm. In short,
these objects that lack immediate visual or historic
appeal have tremendous capacity to teach best and
emerging collections management practices. In cut-
ting across collection types to find best practices for
these objects’ material needs (i.e., by looking to new
media art for assistance in caring for a film archive),
students need to think materially before functionally.
They better appreciate how a collections approach is

distinct from a curatorial approach. Framing these
objects through a collections management lens, stu-
dents need to develop a way of looking at and imagin-
ing objects that cuts across ethnological departments,
historical periods, and, ideally, intellectual paradigms.
Although students may have perceived the collec-
tion of seemingly everyday objects as lacking
resonance and wonder (Greenblatt 1991), through
documenting and handling the objects, I think they
have come to see these objects in a new light, in ways
closer to Watt’s aspiration for the collection: “The
school needs the collection to foster in students a love
for objects, to teach care and handling, to reinforce
the idea that objects are reservoirs of meaning, and to
spark imagination” (Krmpotich and Watt 2011). The
teaching collection objects come to have both reso-
nance and wonder.
In a further attempt to replicate collections man-
agement expectations and working conditions, we
created a secure collections storage area for the
objects. When working with their artifacts outside of
class hours, students use a preprogrammed key fob to
access the object storage area. Workspaces have been
created adjacent to the storage area and in the class-
room. Tables are as often as possible lined with etha-
foam and acid-free tissue to communicate the
“museum quality” of the objects. These materials and
access restrictions also communicate how collections
spaces are distinct from exhibition spaces, board-
rooms, or education spaces. Mason jars of B-72 and
various writing implements let students experiment
with the ultimate act of an object becoming a
museum artifact: applying an acryloid base layer, then
an archival ink number, followed by a top coat. We
experiment with numbers on smooth clear and col-
ored glass surfaces, grainy plastic surfaces, cardboard
boxes, shiny metals, ceramic teacups, and figurines.
In each case, students think through storage posi-
tions, probable exhibition positions, and the vulnera-
bilities of each object. With the ubiquity of digital
photography and technologies like bar codes and
RFID tags, students frequently (and usefully) ques-
tion the necessity of marking objects at all. All of these
tasks and conversations help students appreciate the
time, care, and planning that goes into collections
work as well as the legacy of underlying assumptions.
While the artifacts themselves are usually consid-
ered the teaching collection, in this case, it may also
teaching collections management anthropologically
be necessary to include items like the nitrile gloves
and cotton gloves provided to students. Both of these
types of gloves are used so students can better under-
stand the benefits and limits gloves pose to object
handling and individual safety. The intention is to
help students make more informed decisions in the
future regarding glove use for daily collections prac-
tices, for visiting scholars, and for visiting publics.
Gloved interactions with the teaching collection help
illustrate why there is a revisiting by scholars and
professionals alike of museums’ valuing of touch
compared to their valuing of preservation (cf. Chat-
terjee 2008; Pye 2007). Case studies frequently feature
education collections as the locus of touch (Noble
and Chatterjee 2008; Phillips 2008), while my own
research has explored the touching of permanent col-
lections (Krmpotich and Howard 2014; Krmpotich
and Peers 2013). For students, knowing that touching
practices within museums have shifted through time
(Candlin 2008; Classen 2005; Classen and Howes
2006) coupled with a greater experience handling col-
lections with bare hands and cotton and nitrile gloves
enables them to better contextualize and assess the
range of touch-based projects in the literature. It also
helps them become active in continuing to shape
museums’ positions on touch.
Although at first students were somewhat resistant
to the information technology objects that did not
seem historical enough, ethnographic enough, or
museological enough, the collection quickly con-
fronted them with a range of useful, productive ques-
tions that resonate with any museum collection. The
objects encouraged students to question almost every
field appearing on the cataloguing form. Electronic
devices whose components are built in multiple
places and then assembled in yet another locale made
them question why cataloguing forms have space for
only one place of production. Such objects also had
students asking whether it was the place of produc-
tion or place of consumption that was important and
to further observe that the forms presume these
locales to be the same. Students questioned the pre-
sumed homogeneity of fields like “culture group.” In
addition to asking questions about copyright, infor-
mation technologies had students asking questions
about trademarks, patents, and intellectual property
rights. When dealing with objects that record content
in ways that are only machine readable, students faced
115
teaching collections management anthropologically
the very real dilemma of whether to risk the object’s
physical integrity in order to access the content. They
had to ask: “Why is this being kept?” and “What are
its key features for the museum?” in order to make a
sound collections decision.
Attending to the documentation processes of
accessioning and cataloguing presents students with a
very tangible opportunity to explore anthropological
questions. How is knowledge produced? How do we
organize our world? How do we conceive of objects?
What do we deem to be “authentic”? What are the
values of objects? How does the system I am working
within encourage me to value and classify objects?
What forms of knowledge does the system privilege,
and what else should be said about this object?
Challenges, Part II
A striking outcome of these initial experiments with
the teaching collection was an awareness that students
generally lacked vocabulary to describe materials,
shapes, forms, and manufacturing processes—even
for objects made and used within the last 30 years.
Without intending to reduce this to a superficial
Marxist analysis, our separation from the means of
production does seem to be reducing the utility of
our lexicon for collections practices. There is a double
learning curve for students, then, that includes learn-
ing collections practices as well as learning terminol-
ogy. This extends the amount of time needed for
them to feel comfortable, let alone “fluent,” with doc-
umentary practices. This is not a bad thing per se, but
it does mean as an instructor I need to plan ahead so
that a sense of comfort is feasible before the end of
term: a mere 12 weeks in my case. Without feeling
some sort of comfort before the end of the class, I risk
students feeling unprepared and disempowered—
characteristics distinctly at odds with collections
management.
Shortly after the teaching collection was built, I
began to investigate content management systems
(CMS) options. CMS software encodes and normal-
izes museological assumptions, creating both efficien-
cies and frustrations for collections staff. This also
makes CMS ripe sites for research, reflexivity, and cri-
tique. There was no affordable software if I wanted
concurrent licenses that would allow every student to
access the software simultaneously, especially in later
years where enrollment in the class has been as high
116
as 48.3 I ended up choosing a CMS that could provide
ten concurrent licenses for a minimal cost. On one
hand, this encourages students to work in pairs, dis-
cover the software together, and think through prob-
lems and processes in tandem. On the other hand, as
an instructor, it required me to teach three tutorials
within the term on how to use the software. Students
rarely found this widespread industry-standard soft-
ware intuitive. A fine balance needed to be struck to
minimize their frustration and maximize their learn-
ing. I attempted to reposition their frustrations as
“teachable moments.” Reflecting on the kind and for-
mat of information the software accepted in particu-
lar fields, as well as its user interface and navigability,
the students came to better appreciate why not every
museum had all its records available online and why
consistency across all records can be difficult to
achieve. Students had more pragmatic and empathic
conversations about the challenge of getting museum
records online and, again, the impact of institutional
legacies and industry standards on professional
practice.
The built-in thesaurus within our CMS is Nomen-
clature 3.0. This presents a positive opportunity for
students to gain familiarity with an industry standard.
Equally, it presents a constructive opportunity for
students to critique those standards. Applying the
standard to the collection of information technology
objects brought home the limitations for more recent
objects of classificatory structures and terminology
largely based upon historic artifacts. Not only did stu-
dents not have the ideal vocabulary to work with the
objects, the drop-down menus and preferred terms
failed to adequately capture these mass-produced,
assembled-in-multiple-countries objects.
Ironically, Watt’s research and cataloguing efforts
in another class (“Museums and Indigenous Com-
munities”) illuminated other issues with Nomencla-
ture 3.0’s organizing principles that I have since
researched further and integrated into collections
management teaching more broadly. Watt was help-
ing to catalogue a community collection of largely
Anishinaabe and Cree material heritage stewarded by
First Story Toronto at the Native Canadian Centre of
Toronto. She catalogued a model tikinaagan or cra-
dleboard, which, according to Nomenclature 3.0, is
ultimately classed as a “human powered vehicle” akin
to a bicycle or canoe. I ask students in collections

management to consider why childhood or parent-
hood, family, or childrearing are not included in our
classification of this object. This opens up possibilities
for self-awareness of the gender biases within our sys-
tems and the degree to which modernist principles
and values of “progress” continue to shape museum
work. One of our challenges, then, is to find ways of
adjusting for these biases and thinking about ways to
document objects that will enable museum staff to
work effectively and enable our publics to locate
objects by meaning as well as function.
The capacity to test out different kinds of materials
with cataloguing standards or documentary practices
was an asset. However, this also meant students
needed a greater quantity and variety of objects with
which to experiment beyond information technolo-
gies. It also required something other than “com-
mon” museum artifacts that rarely disrupt the
documentation process in ways that give students
insight into the theoretical foundations of collections
practices.
In January of 2014, I added new objects to the
teaching collection that help students think through
the creation of digital objects and digital assets. The
artifacts include 3D printed objects that are the result
of 3D scanning of an articulated, carved wooden
mask from Korea. The Semaphore Research Cluster
in our Faculty created the 3D printed objects for us.4
In a presentation to the class, researchers explained
that in order to 3D scan all of the components of the
mask, they had to break the mask. They also realized
that with their light scanner, they could never capture
a large-but-clean crack at the top of the mask: there is
nothing for the light to refract off of, so the crack sim-
ply never appears in its digital form. In presentations
to collections management students, the Semaphore
researchers demonstrate and let students try 3D scan-
ning and illustrate the digital processing that goes
along with it. The digital touching-up that needs to
be done with 3D scans brings a whole other “maker”
into the equation when students attempt to catalogue
an object like the 3D printed mask.
Though I have found students often have firm
opinions about “value” and “authenticity” when it
comes to objects like the original wooden mask, these
opinions can be constructively decentered by explor-
ing the lengthy museum practice of reproductions and
models carried through to current 3D scanning and
teaching collections management anthropologically
3D printing practices. Such objects help students
approach projects like Smithsonian’s X3D in ways that
take into account museum processes and workload,
and in ways that ask critical questions about the nat-
ure of objects and the kinds of objects museums value.
Seeing the varieties of possible printed versions,
and having the original for comparison, immediately
raises questions of the value of 3D printed objects for
research and study. The rhetoric of 3D printing is
often that of making “exact copies” of scanned
objects, failing to account for the material difference
but also encouraging us to ask how and when the
material is important. The 3D prints of Lincoln’s
head from the Smithsonian’s X3D site or a 3D print
of an early hominid skull are not very different from a
plaster or resin replica. Yet, there is often something
about the color of 3D prints—the capacity to do them
in blue, yellow, or pink—that emphasizes to students
the difference between the scanned object and the
printed object. In the future, we will be expanding
our conversation even further as students accession
the digital files as objects into our teaching collection.
Our class conversations will necessarily need to
acknowledge the digital as material, our presump-
tions about what copies and reproductions “look”
like, and biases regarding unique or singular objects.
Making Progress, Part II: Borrowing
Collections
The next step to improving the teaching collection
and students’ learning has been to seek out pre-exist-
ing collections rather than assemble disconnected
objects. Disconnected objects are undoubtedly part of
museum collections, but collections management
requires students to also think about the relational
dynamics of collections. Rather than acquire more
items, I set out to build partnerships with collections
that exist on campus. The University of Toronto Sci-
entific Instruments Collection (UTSIC) was an early
and willing partner as Museum Studies faculty had
previously worked directly with the doctoral students
overseeing the collection in their development of pol-
icies and procedures. UTSIC later hired Museum
Studies students to carry out the procedures, and the
two groups have worked together on an annual basis
creating exhibitions that feature UTSIC collections.5
This partnership opened my eyes to the vast num-
ber of scientific and medical collections on campus.
117
teaching collections management anthropologically
The individuals interested in these collections usually
have secondary research interests in the histories of
their discipline and tend to take on responsibility for
them in volunteer capacities. Most recently, we
embarked on partnerships with the Department of
Anatomy and the Department of Medicine (in addi-
tion to UTSIC) to help them document collections
and develop procedures and policies for collections
care. Ideally, students will set into motion policies
and procedures that students in subsequent years will
continue; the achievements of students will be useful
to our partners and encourage longer-standing learn-
ing partnerships.
Medical sciences have a pedagogical approach that
is sympathetic to practice-based learning and the
scale of my class. Were my class to have only 10 to 12
students, I am certain I could find collections place-
ments for my students in the major museums and
galleries in Toronto (including the Art Centre on
campus); however, forty-plus students overwhelm
most collections facilities and any single collections
manager. Moreover, the security clearance and train-
ing that are required in museums and galleries take
valuable time within a semester. In contrast, the Anat-
omy collections, for example, have always been
viewed as teaching collections and regularly receive
the attentions of students. The places they are located
are accessible to students registered with Anatomy
during office hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.), and purpose-
ful, educational handling by students is expected, if
not encouraged.6 The collection spaces are monitored
and can be made accessible to students through direct
communication with the staff. With the scientific col-
lections, experimentation with collections practices
does not compromise work flows or accreditation
needs, and the “risk” (and intrusion) posed by
numerous students working in the space is perceived
to be outweighed by the benefits.
At the same time, these collections provide a kind
of access that is amenable to students’ schedules and
the scale of the course, and the anatomical collections
carry strict behavioral protocols that push back
against current museological (and societal) ideas
about increased or open access. Museum Studies stu-
dents must sign and adhere to the Anatomy Depart-
ment’s guidelines for using the anatomical
collections: to not take any photographs of the
collection or specimens nor to discuss the collection
118
publicly.7 The former restriction reflects the lack of
informed consent by donors for their bodies to be
photographed and caution on the part of the depart-
ment to prevent images circulating in the public
domain that trivialize and/or exoticize the bodies of
the donors. The latter restriction further reflects the
need to behave in ways that show the utmost respect
for donors and their families; collections are not to be
discussed through a voyeuristic or sensational lens.
Rather than police what public discussion is appro-
priate and what is not, there is a blanket clause against
it. Within museums broadly speaking, the restrictions
to which students agree resonate with collections con-
cerns for the security of collections and donors. More
particularly for ethnographic collections, these
restrictions resonate with how institutions, staff, vol-
unteers, and publics treat human remains such as ta
moko, tsantsas, mummies, crania, human tissue, and
even anthropometric photography. On many levels,
the deference shown to the medical “source commu-
nities” (donors and their families) by the Anatomy
Department suggests a greater shift in power and
rights recognition within the institution–community
relationship than has happened within anthropology,
though I am mindful it may also suggest a greater
shift in who the “source community” is, with poten-
tially greater tendency for the source community to
share in the culture of the institution.8
Alongside medical and information technology
collections, students also work with art collections—
previously, in parallel with scientific collections,
though this year as a discrete collection with which to
work. Still, we are able to bridge the art and science
spheres directly; students will be working with a set of
paintings donated to the Museum Studies teaching
collection that were overpainted by the artist repeat-
edly throughout his life. In addition to linking the art-
ist’s biography with his paintings and documenting
and condition reporting these works as a collection,
students will explore possibilities on campus for elec-
tromagnetic and digital technologies (infrared, for
example) to improve understandings of the paintings
—including the layers no longer visible. In our collec-
tive conversations, we are able to explore what it is to
approach scientific specimens and interests as having
aesthetic qualities and, conversely, what it is to
acknowledge the production phases and materiality
of artworks.

The organizational challenge that comes from
scheduling, accessing, and learning to work with dif-
fering collections within the class requires constant
communication as a class. In past classes, we came to
articulate the parallels between our practice-based
learning and the incredibly common use of volunteers
within institutions. Both involve eager but not neces-
sarily experienced or trained individuals who help an
organization fulfill their mandate and responsibilities.
Students come to better understand what kinds and
levels of guidance best support volunteers as they
reflect on what resources, supervision, and spaces
enabled or prevented them from fulfilling their duties.
Whereas in prior years students catalogued an
object from two different collections to learn through
comparison, more recently, students are undertaking
more extensive work with a single collection.
Through weekly discussions with the entire class, stu-
dents will ideally learn about the challenges and solu-
tions both specific to and shared among the seven
collections students are working with this term. It
remains to be seen which strategy will benefit students
and the collections most.
The collections the students work with all have
their strengths and weaknesses. None achieve “best
practice” across all needs and functions, but they are
all collections in progress. Those responsible for the
various collections are eager to improve their care
and are open to recommendations from the students
to this end. Students also get a more realistic sense of
how best practices can be enacted in less-than-ideal
situations. Their recommendations for each collec-
tion must be built on an understanding of why best
practices exist so that they can isolate the most
important practices that support a collection’s needs.
They also need to problem solve strategies to work
toward best practices in ways that reflect budget,
space, and resource constraints. Ideally, best practices
become understood as the result of cumulative efforts
rather than instant fixes.
Final Thoughts
Working with collections is only one part of a larger
course on collections management. We are able to
sustain three weeks of intensive collections practice–
based learning followed by five weeks of further reflec-
tion and delivery of end products for our partners.
The experiences have taught me that it is very hard to
teaching collections management anthropologically
manage 45 collections managers! The number of
gloves and pens and the amount of varnish needed so
that multiple people can undertake the same activity
at the same time requires extensive preparations and
resources. I have learned that communication is an
essential component of the course, though it remains
a constant challenge. As partnerships expand with
other collections, those relations will need to be main-
tained alongside a continual development of strategies
for the teaching collections developed in house.
A core objective for the course since I began
teaching is that students develop the capacity to
articulate the value of collections management: to
their bosses and co-workers, and to their publics.
This brings me back to my own passion for collec-
tions and collections management that I rather
desperately try to impart to my students. I want them
to see “engagement”—the museum buzz word right
now—as very much a collections management issue.
Whether they prefer to conceptualize museums as
spaces about people, ideas, or objects, how collec-
tions managers engage with the collections they
steward will bear directly on how curators, publics,
researchers, interpretive planners, education officers,
and researchers engage with the museum. My hope is
that if museum staff are better prepared to embody
material culture and anthropological approaches to
collections care, museum publics will develop these
capacities as well.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kathleen Adams, Tony Chavarria,
and Maxine McBrinn—swift and adept editors. Thank you
to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive com-
ments on an earlier version. A special thank you to those
who share their collections with the class. Colleagues at the
iSchool have been wonderfully supportive, and teaching
assistant Hannah Turner has been invaluable since the
beginning. A most sincere thanks to every student who has
taken the course, trusted in the experience, and helped me
learn every step of the way.
notes
1. At the 2014 American Anthropological Association (AAA)
meetings in Washington, DC, the session “Producing
Anthropology through Museum Collections: Conversations
in Critical Cataloguing” examined the role of collections
practices in producing museum knowledge and is further
evidence of this growing interest.
119
teaching collections management anthropologically
2. MacFarlan (2001) and Johnson and MacFarlan (2004) do
provide insight on how to improve the value of an already
existing education collection. Of greatest relevance here is
the urging to process education collections in ways that
more closely parallel the processing of permanent collec-
tions. When the staff treat education collections more seri-
ously (i.e., more like permanent collections), their
educational value increases.
3. Attempts to set up various open source software options
never succeeded, even with an IT staff on hand to assist.
The promises of a simple set up and customization failed to
materialize.
4. I thank Daniel Southwick and Isaac Record in particular for
joining our class on multiple occasions to demonstrate the
practice of 3D scanning and printing, and drawing attention
to the manual and intellectual labor required.
5. The exhibition involves research students from the Institute
for the History and Philosophy of Science as content
experts and second-year Museum Studies students who
complete a capstone exhibition project.
6. See Grooss (1995) for an exploration of a historic surgical
teaching collection and Hallam (2010) for a material culture
approach to historic anatomy collections.
7. For Museum Studies students, the minimum penalty for
infringing the signed agreement is failure in the course.
8. I am mindful of past collection practices that saw anatomi-
cal collections for medicine, and equally for archaeology,
physical anthropology, and the general population, grow
through grave robbing, the exploitation of the poor, and
black markets (Harrison 2012).
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