Database as Collaborative Environment.

Why, when museums consider collaboration over their collections, does the database inevitably come up as a pivotal player?I have been involved in museum databases, all collaborative in some sense of that word, for over 40 years, yet I still find this question hard to answer.In one sense, I can answer the question easily.Databases always come to the table, early, because they are both the information technology of collecting institutions and because digitality has been, for many years, endowed with the apparent qualities of exactitude, access and authority, qualities that are seen as essential to guaranteeing access to authorised expertise.However, I also find it difficult to offer a meaningful explanation as I know that digitality, and databases in particular, offer none of these qualities to information, necessarily.In fact, the only generalizable qualities of digitality, whether databased or not, are diverse multiplicity and local performativity (Boast 2017).So how do we approach this problem of databases and collaboration?What does digitality bring to the table that is unique and essential, if anything?I was going to approach this problem, the problem of digitality, of databases and collaboration, from the point of view of the genealogy of representation in anthropological museums.The reason I wanted to start there was that so much of what we see as "documentation," the information about collected objects, is constrained by a set of historical conditions that establish the entitlements of what can, and cannot, be done and said.In Philosophy we call these entitlements ontology.We are not going to go into the complexities of philosophical metaphysics here, you are, I am sure, glad to hear, but the understanding of what my colleague, Esther Weltevrede, calls "affordances"(Weltevrede 2016: 10-14), that these cultural traditions impose, are central to our concerns here.The affordances are not just found within the culture of the institution, as I was going to discuss, but also in the culture and cultural histories of the technologies we seek to apply.However, the more I wrote this article from this point of view, from the institutional point of view, the more distant digitality became.So I decided that it was better to approach the problem from the side of digitality.We will get to the museum at several points, but I think from this direction, that of the digital, my points will be better made.Mostly because I want you to come to consider digitality a very different thing than you may be used to.We have all contributed to this special theme because we believe that it is possible to break with