Mapping Black Sculpture

June 20, 2022

The Fitzwilliam Museum

🍵 1 min to read (suggested)

Towards the end of my time working at the Museum, a small database project came up for one of the Keepers of museum collections - Vicky Avery. She had been awarded funding to develop a database of sculptures representing Black people in museum collections in the United Kingdom. To enable this, I implemented:

  • an Omeka S project website (only internal usage until research reaches critical mass), which

enabled data collection

  • IIIF images
  • a logical CIDOC CRM mapped schema
  • links to people and other entities
  • mapping of objects to their current locations.

A screenshot from Omeka S
A screenshot from Omeka S

There's not much I can say about this project, as the content was in development when I left. Once the Omeka S database was assembled, the plan was to use the API in the same way as we did for the Hayley Papers project and build a front end with some great UX and UI work.

It could end up being a very crucial piece of scholarship.

People I worked with

  • Vicky Avery
  • Dawnanna Kreeger
UP