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Kathleen Lawther

Curator

Collections Researcher

I am a freelance curator who specialises in documenting museum collections to make them more accessible. I’m passionate about the information that museums record, preserve and share about their collections, and the need to get real about the problematic aspects of museums, both past and present.

Projects

the Museum Studies school building at the University of Leicester

Doctoral Research

My research seeks to investigate how the history and practice of collections documentation has impacted the representation of museum collections in the digital cultural record.

photograph album page with six black and white snapshots of women with the caption 'Somali'

Headley Fellowship

I was awarded a Headley Fellowship from the Art Fund to work with Powell-Cotton Museum on a project looking at how the museum records and shares the stories of people who were involved in the Powell-Cotton family’s collecting.

Ipswich Museum World Collections

Ipswich Museum is a local authority museum which first opened in 1881. In 2020 they were awarded a Development Grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a project focusing on ‘the museum’s outstanding Victorian heritage – the philanthropists, industrialists and scientists who started it; the collections; the fascinating cast of characters who collected them and the museum building they built to house them.’

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Resources

People-Centred Cataloguing

Created as part of my Art Fund Headley Fellowship with the Powell-Cotton Museum, this resource explains the approach to cataloguing which I took during the project. The publication includes suggestions and case studies for how museums might take a more people-centred approach to their collections documentation work.

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Content warnings for online collections

Suggestions for successfully applying content warnings to digital collections content and publicly available museum databases, based on a survey of current practice in across the websites of 25 GLAM institutions.

Doing the Work report

I wrote a report summarising the discussions from the workshop Doing the Work: Documenting Collections. The result, Documentation as a Site for Critical Decolonial and Anti-Racist Work, has been published alongside essays covering the other workshops in the series, edited by Anjalie Dalal-Clayton and Ilaria Puri Purini.

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Blog

14th April 2022

I am a freelance curator who specialises in documenting museum collections to make them more accessible. I’m passionate about the information that museums record, preserve and share about their collections, and the need to get real about the problematic aspects of museums, both past and present.

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Kathleen has worked wonders on the Persons and Institutions database, which is being prepared for upload to Axiell and which then allows us to pull through data on donors and collectors into object records and analyse it in ways we’ve not been able to before (this is ground-breaking for the World Cultures collections here, as only a few key objects have this information included in their records).

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