Title: The collection catalogue as the core of a modern Museum’s purpose and activities Author: Tanya Szrajber Position: Head of Documentation, The British Museum Contact: Tszrajber@britishmuseum.org The original title of this paper has been modified slightly, since the expression ‘collection catalogue’ has replaced ‘collection database’. The main reason is that many institutions around the world do not have the resources to acquire and maintain a database, relying on other means instead. A collection catalogue can take many forms. Ideally, it is an online database, but it can also be a spreadsheet, a set of manual or typed records, or for intangible cultural heritage, sound and video recordings. The eventual aim is to digitise the information and make it publicly available. As long as the information is presented in a structured format, this goal is achievable thanks to the development of standards such as SPECTRUM and CIDOC-CRM. The second reason is that the revised title reinforces the main point of this paper. Recently, a great deal of attention has quite rightly been paid to technological and other developments surrounding the use and re-use of collection data. It is my intention to highlight the process which generates the data in the first place, the complexities of which are not always fully appreciated, ie. cataloguing. Museums and other repositories of collections share a basic set of objectives, and meet them to a greater or lesser degree. Generally speaking, these are: documenting the collection; its care and preservation; providing physical and virtual access to it; developing, researching and interpreting the collection; developing and sharing expertise; engaging communities and the general public. The internationally recognised collections management standard SPECTRUM details twenty one procedures relevant to museum collections. These are: Pre-entry; Object entry; Loans in; Acquisition; Inventory control; Location and movement Control; Transport; Cataloguing; Object condition checking and technical assessment; Conservation and collections care; Risk management; Insurance and indemnity management; Valuation control; Audit; Rights management; Use of collections; Object exit; Loans out; Loss and damage; Deaccession and disposal; Retrospective documentation. Many institutions, public and private, may not require or have the resources for implementing the full range of procedures. However, cataloguing is identified in SPECTRUM as one of eight primary procedures, and is defined as ‘The compilation and maintenance of key information, formally identifying and describing objects. It may include information concerning the provenance of objects and also collections management documentation e.g. details of acquisition, conservation, exhibition and loan history, and location history. It need not bring together in one location everything known about an object, but should provide cross-references to any other relevant information sources known to the organisation.’ In my opinion, cataloguing is the most fundamental of the SPECTRUM procedures, since without appropriate information about the objects, the others could simply not take place. Producing a collection catalogue is a collaborative effort between various specialists, principally curators (and other academics), documentation specialists and IT specialists. These three categories of expertise are not mutually exclusive and in some cases the roles are conflated for beleaguered individuals who have to cope with all three. Documentation specialists facilitate the transfer of curatorial knowledge about the objects to the system