Curatorial Conundrums: Cataloging Bespoke Software

As born digital material is increasingly collected by institutions, the question of how to describe and catalogue this material becomes increasingly pressing. The sector has a good understanding of cataloging simple, stand alone born digital objects such as a jpeg image or a word document, but what about more complex born digital objects such as bespoke software? The Canterbury Museum faced exactly this challenge when offered the display components of an exhibition about NASAs involvement in Antarctica. The need to add functioning power cables, mice and speakers to run the display units further complicated the matter. Should it be part of the permanent collection or the information collection? After running through the pros and cons of treating the exhibition unit like a bag of archaeological material or like a book with removable inserts (among other things), the team finally landed on a decision. The hardware will be listed as separate objects and the various files that make up the bespoke software will be treated as removable parts of one object.

I would like to use Canterbury Museum’s case study as a starting point for discussing the management of digital collections.