Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Infographics

The project 'Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship' (2020-22, AHRC, Project Reference AH/T013036/1) sought to develop a platform for a transformational impact in digital scholarship within cultural institutions by opening up new and important directions for computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues. Our pilot research investigated the temporal and spatial legacy of a landmark catalogue: the ‘Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum’, entries in which form the basis of related catalogue data at institutions including the Lewis Walpole Library and the British Library.

Towards the end of the project we invited together members of our community to discuss shared agendas and actions: where we should focus our collective resources, what things we need to work differently, and the role of computational technologies in both shaping and constraining change.

These infographics respond to those conversations. 'Legacy catalogue entries: actions and agendas' presents priorities that emerged from a longlist of project findings. And 'Tracing the transmission of legacy catalogue entries' visualises the journey of legacy catalogue data in our case study from conception, through cataloging infrastructures, and into the future.

Both graphics were designed by Lucy Havens, with editorial support from James Baker and Rossitza Atanassova. The process is described at Lucy Havens, 'Designing Infographics for the “Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions” Project' (March 2022).

We thank our community of participants for their encouragement and suggestions during the design process.

Larger version of each graphic are available for print purposes on request. Contact j.w.baker@soton.ac.uk to request a copy.