Material Connections: “The Smithsonian Effect” in Anthropological Cataloguing

Museum curators led development of the discipline of anthropology in the late nineteenth century, and at the same time developed foundational systems for cataloguing cultural materials. Although entering and accessing catalogue information now relies on keyboards rather than inkwells, the earliest systems continue to influence our understanding of objects. Among the most influential of the early systems was that of the Smithsonian's United States National Museum ( USNM ), with its first anthropological catalogue entry dating to 1859. Analysis of the material culture of the ubiquitous catalogue books of American museums both before and after the establishment of the USNM system reveals its wide and lasting impact. This system normalized certain fields as essential and disciplined data accordingly, resisting alternate ideas about information offered by donors and by later developments in anthropology. While many museums have now moved through successive generations of information management systems, the effect of early data choices has seldom been examined.