Pitt Rivers Museum

General Pitt-Rivers’s photographic collections have received little attention before now. The surviving evidence relating to his acquisition of photographs is reviewed and, in particular, a collecting trip to Scandinavia in 1879 described. It is argued that Pitt-Rivers collected photographs primarily in order to complement the displays in the exhibition of his collection at South Kensington Museum from 1878 to 1884.

This book chapter looks back over ten years of putting photograph collections online at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Oxford’s museum of anthropology and world archaeology. This has been a period of intense activity on externally funded research projects, digitization, and website and database development. Through a series of case studies, I discuss ways in which images – of both objects and historical photography – have been ‘translated’ online, and the strategies employed by the Museum’s curators and project staff (including, reflexively, myself) in negotiating interactions with museum collections within a digital environment.