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Purpose: This paper considers how knowledge has been organized about museum objects and belongings at the Museum of Anthropology, in what is now known as British Columbia, and proposes the concept of historical or provenance warrant to understand how cataloguing decisions were made and are limited by current museum systems. Design/methodology/approach: Through interviews and archival research, we trace how cataloguing was done at the museum through time and some of the challenges imposed by historical documentation systems. Findings: Reading from the first attempts at standardizing object nomenclatures in the journals of private collectors to the contemporary practices associated with object documentation in the digital age, we posit that historic or provenance warrant is crafted through donor attribution or association, object naming, the concept of geo-cultural location and the imposition of unique identifiers, numbers and direct labels that physically mark belongings. Originality/value: The ultimate goal and contribution of this research is to understand and describe the systems that structure and organize knowledge, in an effort to repair the history and terminologies moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1935, Librarian John E. Abbott of the Museum of Modern Art wrote this of the contemporary status of film preservation: "the situation is as though there existed a great interest in painting on the part of the public, but that almost no painting were ever exhibited save those executed within the previous twelve months." In the early twentieth century, film collections were not sought after by museums, because the relevance of film to museum mandates had not yet been defined. In this paper, we refer to the creation of some of the first museum film libraries and archives, in order to examine the effort of their establishment within a museum, and the philosophical challenges and appeals that must be addressed when these mediums meet, in the interplay between archival and museological theory. We shall briefly review the beginning of film museums, and then discuss where the nature and priorities of museums most affected these pioneering film libraries and archives. These influences manifest in the rationale of why films should be collected, in the details of what should be acquired, and in the practical and philosophical challenges that are not commonly found in other information institutions, but are characteristic of museum work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]