Documentation Detectives: Transcribing Accession Registers

Staff

Suzanne Knibbs

Hello, I’m Suzanne, the Participation Officer for Dynamic Collections. I work with Collections Information Coordinator, Ayesha, welcoming groups into the Museum Collection Centre, to go behind the scenes and get hands-on with the collections. Through my museum career, I have primarily worked across the Historic Properties, where the visitor experience was at the heart of my role. I am excited to work with communities and to support increasing access to the collections.

Alex Pinfold

I’m a Collection Information Assistant currently working on digitising BMT’s accession registers as part of the Dynamic Collections project. Prior to joining BMT, I worked in commercial archaeology first as an excavator and then archives assistant. My research interests have focused primarily on decolonisation and Cold War protest heritage, in particular the history of Black British anti-racist activist groups such as the British Black Panthers.

Ayesha Hussain

Hello, I am Ayesha, Collections Information Coordinator at Birmingham Museums Trust. I work with Suzanne increasing access to our collection, by inviting groups to get hands on with our collection and improve our documentation. I have worked in a variety of roles at BMT, all of them with documentation at their core – and am excited to increase access to documentation too.

Misaho Washizu

I'm the Documentation Registrar at Birmingham Museums Trust, responsible for our collection data and ensuring its accuracy and integrity. I manage all aspects of our Collections Management System, KE EMu, including system administration, data control, user access, and providing procedural training for staff. Currently, I'm exploring the potential of crowdsourcing and Python for the first time through this project on Zooniverse. This has got me thinking about whether crowdsourcing could be a new and effective way to tackle our long-standing data backlog in museum documentation. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Advisor

Sebastian Bustamante

Seb joined the Documentation Detectives team and was instrumental in creating and setting up the project. He is currently working at the University of Birmingham as a Research Associate.

Samantha Blickhan

Sam is Co-Director and Digital Humanities Lead for Zooniverse.org who has given us guidance on setting up the project.

Peter Mason

Peter is a self-taught Python programmer and Zooniverse volunteer who has given technical advice and generously wrote a number of Python codes used for the project.

Mia Ridge

Mia has designed and researched crowdsourcing projects as a way to encourage public access that enriches collections for a range of museums and libraries.