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Stopped trusting photos on museum websites and started calling the curators, and it saved my whole research project
Two years ago I built an entire paper around a bronze age spearhead photo from a museum site in Dublin, and the label on the web page had the period wrong by about 400 years. I found out because a curator I emailed for a higher resolution image mentioned in passing that the online catalog had never been updated after a re-dating in 2011. Now I call or email the collections office before I cite anything, every single time, even when the listing looks solid. It takes an extra week of waiting around but it has caught three mislabeled pieces since. Does anyone else have a go-to step for checking online catalog records before they use them?
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margaretramirez11d ago
This is basically the same thing that happened with printed maps and guidebooks back in the day, the info gets locked in once it's published and nobody goes back to fix it. I run into it with restaurant hours on Google too, a place closes at 8 now but the listing still says 10 because nobody updated it after covid. The web just makes it feel more official than it is, like if it's on a museum site it must be checked, but half these catalogs are built once and then left to rot. You're basically doing the human version of a fact check and it's wild that it keeps paying off.
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