Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The museum catalogue has historically been used to classify artifacts based on their material and contextual features. The use of natural history, catalogue‐based classifications in nineteenth‐century museums resulted in curators designating some anthropological museum specimens as duplicates. These items were then used in specimen exchanges among museums and collectors, which served to extend each recipient's scope of collections. This article explores how cataloguing techniques recontextualized anthropological artifacts into specimens, which then circulated based on networks of correspondence. I compare the purpose and goals of three exchanges carried out by the Smithsonian Institution to the Rijks Ethnographic Museum in Leiden, the Historical Department of Iowa, and U.S. Congressman Joel P. Heatwole. Specimen exchange highlights the interconnections among institutions and emphasizes how approaches to collecting by one museum can affect the content of collections in other museums.</jats:p>