Documenting and digitising fieldwork

Documenting and digitising fieldwork

We work with anthropologists to document and digitise their collections of fieldwork photographs, and add them to our photographic collections.

Museum staff can:

Advise on the process of selecting and ordering your collections before documenting them. It is important that collections are initially reviewed for archival suitability. If collections are not already ordered systematically (for example according to date or location), this would be done before creating a registry order of the collection.
Advise on the documentation of a collection. Staff will take anthropologists through the process of cataloguing, and explain the categories of information that should be recorded to allow subsequent incorporation into the Museum's database.
Make a digitisation plan based upon the size of the collection, the photographic format, and whether the collection needs to be scanned prior to documentation (such as negative-only collections).
Plan to make the collection accessible online via the Museum's Collections Online or this website.

This process makes the material available both to the academic community as well as, potentially, members of the communities represented in the collection. Staff always work closely with donors on questions of cultural sensitivity regarding access to certain parts of a collection, and will always restrict access to sensitive or personal information online where this is felt appropriate.

Dr Nicholas J. Allen collection

Dr Allen's collection contains fieldwork photographs from Nepal 1969–71, which have been accessioned and will be incorporated into the Museum's photograph collections database.

Paul Baxter collections

Dr Baxter's collection contains field photographs of the Borana people of northern Kenya. The negatives have been scanned and are in the process of being catalogued.

Christopher Hallpike collections

Christopher Hallpike is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, McMaster University, Canada. He is known for his research and fieldwork on the Tauade people of Papua New Guinea (fieldwork images from 1970–2) and the Konso of Ethiopia (1965–7 and 1997). These are now digitised.

Patti Langton collection

Patti Langton donated her collection of photographs of the Moru, Tuich Dinka and Larim people in Eastern Africa from 1979–80. Patti has become a research associate at the Museum and continues to document her collection here.

Brian Moser/Donald Taylor collection

Brian Moser and Donald Tayler donated a collection of photographs from fieldwork among indigenous groups in Colombia. The slides of this collection have been digitised and the Museum is in the process of scanning the negatives.

John Tyman collection

Dr John Tyman's research looks at daily life under different environmental conditions. He has lived for extended periods of time with families in the Arctic, Papua New Guinea, the Himalayas and the Sahara. He has donated his Inuit and Papua New Guinea fieldwork slides to the Museum.

Peter Rivière collection

Peter Rivière was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford until his retirement in 2001. His research and fieldwork focused on lowland South America. Peter worked with Museum staff on the documentation of his fieldwork photographs; in 2008, his entire collection of negatives was digitised.

Peter Worsley collection

Peter Worlsey's photographs at the Pitt Rivers Museum relate entirely to his 1952–3 fieldwork expedition to Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Worsley donated his photographs from Groote Eylandt in 2009 and worked with Museum staff on the documentation for them, based on his original notes and captions. The negatives were unrolled, cut into strips and scanned shortly afterwards.

Schuyler Jones collection

Former Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum Schuyler Jones deposited his important photographic archive in 2013. Museum staff digitised the photographs for him to catalogue remotely in the USA, sending back captions for the database.