Culture Cleaning

 Hello!

As part of the Unlocking Community Museum Collections project, one of my tasks this summer has been to 'clean' the CollectiveAccess Culture field. This has meant looking through each museum's database to see what has been entered into the culture field (that's a total of 349,748 records!). I have been making note of all the different cultures entered, keeping track of common trends, and correcting outdated language. 

One of the long-term goals of this project is to make the Culture field public on NovaMuse, thus making records searchable by culture. This project has a special focus on Nova Scotia's four founding communities: Acadian, African Nova Scotian, Gaelic, and Mi'kmaq. Ideally, all records associated with one of these cultures should be linked together and easily found. In order for this to work effectively, it is important for the field to be filled out correctly using consistent language. I thought I would share some trends and tips that I came across in my cleaning that might help us to make better use of the Culture field moving forward. 

Stats

Out of the 349,748 total records, only about 6% of them included a Culture field entry. Of the 56 databases, 8 of them included no culture entries at all and the rest had very few entries. We are hoping to increase use of this field in order to link as many objects to their cultures as possible. 
 

Language

Making sure the database records are as accurate and respectful as possible means using the most up-to-date and preferred language when describing cultural communities. It is also important to remain consistent with spelling and terminology. For instance, Acadian, African Nova Scotian, Gaelic, and Mi'kmaq are the preferred terms used within CollectiveAccess. 

A resource that I found to be very helpful when doing this work is Indigenous Peoples: Language Guidelines, created by the University of British Columbia. 

Culture vs. Group

The Culture field is meant to identify the culture associated with the object based on its social or geographic origin. Terms should be entered using the adjectival form. (ie. Scottish, German, Mi'kmaq, etc.)

The Group field is used to connect objects with associated groups or organizations. Political parties, religions, sports, fraternities, and clubs are all examples of grouping options. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that CollectiveAccess also has a Military Unit field, so this type of information does not need to be entered into either the Culture or Group field. 

Overall, the Culture field presents a great opportunity to improve access to information on NovaMuse and create a more user friendly experience for the public. Keeping in mind that this is an ongoing effort that will take time, we are already making exciting progress towards being able to link cultural records together. Next time you are entering or editing a record on CollectiveAccess, take a quick look at the Culture field to see if there is any information that could be added or updated.