W.O. Oldman, Ethnographic Specimens, London traded between the late 1890s and 1913. These business records of Oldman are held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) and include detailed information about his purchases and sales of objects including names of original sources for objects he acquired and sold.

The data set includes transcription of the sale registers and other business records which contain detailed information about Oldman’s purchases and sales of objects.

The transcription of these records was conducted by the Smithsonian Transcription Centre and 215 volunteers. Volunteers transcribe the records as seen, including spelling and grammatical errors, these transcriptions are peer reviewed before being accepted. Some human errors may exist within the data set. The dataset was provided on an open basis to Te Papa by the Smithsonian Transcription Centre.

Ethnographic specimens with a provenance to Oldman’s business can now be found in various public institutions around the world including the Te Papa, Brooklyn Museum, British Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington. This data will be useful in establishing and confirming the provenance information for various institutions collections.

Te Papa would like to acknowledge the assistance received from The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) to digitise this collection, the Smithsonian’s Transcriptions Centre for transcription services and to all the volunteers who assisted with transcriptions of the individual pages.

Licence for reuse

This dataset is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication CC0 1.0

Data and Resources

This page has the data as CSV only. For TXT and XML versions, please download from the data.govt.nz page.