At its most basic level, Hannah Turner’s Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation could be understood as a case history of documentary practices of the Department of Anthropology of the United States Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) from its origins to the present day. At least, this is what its Cataloging-in-Publication data suggests with the subdivision “Case studies” for each of its five subject headings assigned: “National Museum of Natural History (U.S.); Museums — Collection management; Ethnologic museums and collections; Indians of North America — Material culture; and Museums and Indians.” In fact, Cataloguing Culture’s case study is a critical telescope that Turner turns upon a broad range of cataloging practices and perspectives common in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and special collections (GLAMS).

Turner, currently an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Information who investigates the connection between documentation, culture, and technology, worked as a lecturer in museum studies at the University of Leicester, and the influence of both media and museum studies are felt throughout the text. After an introduction (“The Making of Specimens Eloquent”) that sets out the argument put forth by the author, the book is divided into five roughly chronological chapters beginning with an explanation of how early anthropologists and ethnologists defined evidence in their field (Chapter 1, “Writing Desiderata: Defining Evidence in the Field”); paper systems of classification at the NMNH (Chapter 2, “On the Margins: Paper Systems of Classification”); the development of the card catalog and other cataloging systems at the NMNH (Chapter 3, “Ordering Devices and Indian Files: Cataloguing Ethnographic Specimens”); NMNH cataloging and classification after 1950 (Chapter 4 “Pragmatic Classification: The Routine Work of Description after 1950”); and finally, Chapter 5, “Object, Specimen, Data: Computerization and the Legacy of Dirty Data,” focuses on the computerization and digitization of these earlier systems, followed by the conclusion “A Museum Data Legacy for the Future.”