Barbara Mathe

Barbara Mathé is an Associate in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Her career in museum libraries and archives, Associate Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum Archivist at the American Museum of Natural History spans card catalogs to linked open data. Her interest in integrated web access to information across institutions and disciplines is reflected in her work as a member of the international advisory group to develop a collection level data standard for natural history collections (NCD) to access specimens and objects along with archival materials. As a result of this and other work with data standards, AMNH was asked to become a member of the SNAC pilot project hosted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Her personal research interests encompass the history of museums and particularly the representation of indigenous cultures. She was co-curator of a photographic exhibition at the AMNH, “Drawing Shadows to Stone: Photographing North Pacific Peoples, 1897-1903” that, in an inversion of the traditional norm, displayed museum objects, and archival sound and video to contextualize the photographs. Her current research is on the photographs taken of people on display at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. She lives in Brooklyn and New Orleans.