What we're reading: new approaches in documentation and collections management

When not hard at work on the Future Ecologies of Clay project, I’m a curator in a local authority museum. In that role I work with a wide range of collections, from social history and world cultures to decorative art. Most curators today are generalists like me, and the erosion of specialist posts and curatorial expertise has certainly caused problems for the sector; but there is also much to be gained by applying lessons from other areas of museum practice to the challenge of collecting ceramics in the expanded field.

By training, I am also a museologist and historian of museums. My research has shown me how professional practice in collections has transformed since the nineteenth century. Things that seem like eternal realities of museum work, from permanent collecting to the prohibition on touching accessioned objects, are just conventions; they developed for complex reasons which may not apply in every context today.

Some questions that interest me especially are:

• Can ceramics curators (or curators collecting ceramics) learn from social history curators, bringing memory as well as history into their documentation process? Is collecting in the expanded field more like collecting community life than it is like collecting pots?
• What can be learned from attempts to decolonise collecting practices? Can we borrow ideas of community, polyvocality, relationality?
• How do we address questions of scale and storage for installation work? At a time when museum storage is under relentless pressure, how can large-scale works be collected both practically and ethically? Will this problem create pressure towards dematerialisation and performance?
• If a work necessarily invites touch, how do we balance the competing needs of preservation and physical interaction between audience and work?
• Can works in the expanded field ever be collected retrospectively? Or is it necessary for museums to focus on contemporary collecting to avoid this work being lost forever?
• Is the term ‘object’, and its centrality in museum collecting, problematic?
• How have existing museum taxonomies excluded practices in the expanded field of clay? Do the taxonomies need to be reworked, or could these artworks act as provocative ‘boundary objects’ which make the categories newly visible in useful ways?

I have found the following recent works particularly helpful in thinking through these questions:

Candlin, Fiona (2010), Art, Museums and Touch, Manchester University Press

Grewcock, Duncan (2014), Doing Museology Differently, Routledge

Henderson, Jane (2020), ‘Beyond lifetimes: who do we exclude when we keep things for the future?’, Journal of the Institute of Conservation 43:3, pp. 195-212

Jones, Michael (2021), Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum, Routledge

Knell, Simon J. (2012), ‘The intangibility of things’, in Sandra H. Dudley (ed.), Museum Objects: experiencing the properties of things, Routledge

Krmpotich, Cara and Alice Stevenson (eds.) (2024), Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice, UCL Press (open access)

Latham, Kiersten F. (2012), ‘Museum object as document’, Journal of Documentation 68:1, pp. 45-71

Wilder, Ken and Aaron McPeake (eds.) (2025), Beyond the Visual, UCL Press (open access)

What other readings can you recommend that speak to these questions?