Documenting museum assets. Cataloguing the collections of the Ethnomusicology Section of the Ethnography Division at Museo de La Plata, Argentina

Abstract

Approaching the management of ethnographic collections involves consideration of multiple perspectives due to the variety of formats implied in the classification, and regarding both the material included and the criteria adopted for its elaboration within the context of a museum. This paper presents the results of a cataloguing model designed specifically for the collection of music instruments in the Ethnomusicology Section of the Ethnography Division of Museo de La Plata (Universidad Nacional de La Plata). The purposes of this cataloguing model are: (i) to shed light on the role of the construction of a catalogue aimed at containing information coming from a variety of sources; and (ii) the study of the corpus under consideration. We discuss the implications of both the systematization of data, and the construction of instrument typologies based on organological principles and descriptive methodology to enable access to the peculiarities of the items following different approaches, in order to promote the development of new lines of investigation in the context of ethnomusicology, both from the perspective of the material heritage and of their cultural representations.