Where an object came from, where it has traveled and whose hands it has been in, is the focus of a three-year research grant project by Sarah Buchanan.
An assistant professor in the University of Missouri College of Education, Buchanan is an archivist with a three-year, $295,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to study provenance — those object biographies of where they came from and their trajectories over time and space.
In her first research paper from the grant, Buchanan worked with Sarah Mohr, at Brown University, to compile a bibliography of the college and university locations of clay cuneiform tablets in the U.S. Both MU and Brown have the tablets, examples of the first human writing system used in Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — more than 3,000 years ago. The bibliography was published in the Journal of Open Humanities Data.