Hi all,
At the National Portrait Gallery, we use Attributes as well, but we’ve always called the term type “Cultural Affiliation”, since we don’t track nationality and we hesitate
to commit ethnicity…though we do, since we include all of the terms that Christine showed in her screenshots. Like the Neslon-Atkins, we do not flag constituents as American except in very unusual cases. But we do enter gender for both male and female constituents.
(Side note: I recently entered “Female” for photographer Catherine Opie, but I did a lot of reading before committing! If I didn’t feel certain about a constituent’s gender identity, I would not make the decision myself.)
A screenshot of our relevant cultural affiliation terms is below. Many constituents have multiple cultural affiliations, and querying has become burdensome, since we often
need to find constituents that are Asian and/or Asian American. And then there’s African vs. African American—this is a problem for me since the inquiries I get here are most often looking for diversity in general. I maintain constituent packages of the groups
I need to query for and update the packages each time I’m asked for stats…which is increasingly frequent!
Thanks to Amanda for posting this question! I’m very interested to see what others are doing.
Best,
Sue
Sue Garton
Data Administrator and Acting Head of
Collections Information and Research
Smithsonian
National Portrait Gallery
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From: The Museum System (TMS) Users <[log in to unmask]>
On Behalf Of Christine Droll
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2018 2:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Constituent Gender & Ethnicity
Hi Amanda,
We’ve been tracking Ethnicity and Gender for many years. We use the Attributes function in the Constituent module for both Gender and Ethnicity. When we began
tracking (in 1995), the defaults (and majority of artists) were Caucasian and Male, so only those records which were neither were given attributes. It was up to the curator to make the call as to ethnicity and gender. And we’ve yet to do retroactive data entry
for white males.
Now that these concepts are more fluid and are open to a more elastic interpretation, the nomenclature has not kept up with the trends. We’ve yet to convene a
committee to make recommendations. But like you, we are getting enquiries about the makeup of the artists in our collections. Perhaps such scrutiny will result in a more detailed and refined vocabulary sooner rather than later.
Christine
Christine Droll
Registrar, Database & Collections
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street
Kansas City, MO 64111
T: 816-751-1333
F: 816-751-0499
From: The Museum System (TMS) Users <[log in to unmask]>
On Behalf Of Dearolph, Amanda
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2018 1:14 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Constituent Gender & Ethnicity
Hello,
Lately I have been receiving requests, both internal and external, for information about the artists in our permanent collection and their demographic information. The majority of the requests
have to do with gender, and more recently ethnicity. If you are tracking this information, how have you been entering it into TMS? And have you incorporated ULAN into your records? Currently we use attributes to enter artist gender, which gives us the flexibility
to include non-binary labels, but ethnicity is not something we've ever tracked in TMS before.
-A
AMANDA DEAROLPH
DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR
COLLECTION INFORMATION & DIGITAL ASSETS
T: 323.857.4758
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