Zoë Hollingworth, Collections Systems Lead at the V&A, reports on her department’s recent work on outdated – and often offensive – terminology.
The vast array of objects held by the V&A – ranging from paintings and statues to costumes and furniture – provide insights into the political, social and economic histories of a wide range of cultures. How we describe and tell stories about these objects and archives is a fundamental aspect of museum work. However, language and terminology are constantly evolving, and we must adapt to new ways of thinking about culture and people, recognising that certain terms used to describe groups of people are increasingly considered insensitive and harmful. This work has gained momentum over the past few years as museums have started to challenge the status quo and re-interpret collections.
In at the deep end
The primary issue the Collections Management Department at the V&A had to tackle was the outdated terminology used in the historic descriptions and titles of works of art, which was largely unaddressed in the cataloguing and interpretation sections of our collections management system (CMS).
Our starting point was a document written by the V&A’s Interpretation Department, a racial terminology guide, which was last updated in 2017. This document serves as a glossary of racial terms and offers suggestions on how to address them, whether putting the term in quotation marks or adding a disclaimer.
The guide is primarily utilised for labels within the physical galleries, though, and often not applied to the CMS. Given collections data is pulled from the CMS and presented online, we knew we needed to apply the same guidance to the collections database. We also wanted to help develop guidance for disability and LGBTQI+ terms that can be found in our collections.
In 2019, my team trawled through the CMS to locate the racial terms we were aware of and apply the Interpretation Department’s suggestions to the appropriate field. Because cataloguing of object records and archives is done by our curatorial and archives teams, we wanted to ensure we tracked how many records per collection we found and noted any issues.
With this initial data-cleaning task complete, we were keen for our collections colleagues to take the work forward. We wrote instructions on how and where to apply the racial terminology guidance in the CMS and ensured we continued conversations around this work in relevant meetings.
New site, new opportunity
During most of 2020, the Digital Media team were hard at work on the new online collections site, Explore the Collections (there’s more on the background and development of that here). Collections Management had been working with Digital Media on clarifying what information is captured in the CMS and how this could be presented online. The new site offered an opportunity to improve how we presented racial language in our collections and, with our colleagues in digital, we were able to implement two new features: a content warning and an image filter.
The content warning is applied from the CMS and is triggered if there is a concern around language. This includes objects that are inherently problematic; objects that have a controversial or problematic provenance; and objects with historically problematic descriptions. The aim is not to remove the language, but flag its presence in a record to an online visitor and encourage curators to provide further explanation or context.
The image filter is applied in our digital asset management system (DAMS), which is where images for all our collections are stored. Like the content warning in the CMS, we use the image filter to warn online visitors of an image that is considered offensive.
On every Explore the Collections object page there is a generic disclaimer highlighting the V&A’s commitment to addressing outdated and discriminatory language. While Collections Management assist curatorial and archives colleagues with this work, we also want to encourage our visitors to engage with it. Through the Suggest Feedback button, online visitors can flag offensive or problematic content on a particular object that my team can help action.
Ongoing discussions
As curators increased their efforts to tackle insensitive language, many questions about how to address certain topics were coming to me and my team. While we could point people towards guidance, we felt more could be done to discuss issues with a wider group of people. In January 2021 we started a discussion forum whereby colleagues could submit records they were dealing with and the group could determine a course of action.
My aim was to capture decisions in a single document so it could be accessed by anyone. I also made it clear that the decisions or recommendations we made would need to be revisited as language evolved and that we might need to consult externally on certain topics. Membership is open to all staff and to date we have discussed 230 objects, archives and images with topics ranging from ‘antisemitism’ to ‘oriental’.
With each new term and topic raised for discussion, my colleague Natasha Logan has been working with the Interpretation team to revise the previous racial terminology guide into a working document that can be continually added to. This will be shared with colleagues across the museum so everyone can apply the same recommendations.
The work to improve terminology that we have been doing in Collections Management at the V&A is only one small part of a larger discussion, but we believe it’s an important part.
All images © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Published 26 July 2021