For the time being, I know where the Elgin Marbles have been and how they traveled around Europe for all research purposes. This information is sitting in a spreadsheet in my Google Drive, organized by sculpture number, location, donor, etc. All this information, that is, for the 120 Elgin fragments in the British Musuem.
For the past two weeks, I've been organizing the metadata of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum. This is a long and tedious process because it requires me to comb through museum catalogs to find information and pictures (when possible) for these artifacts. Now that I've finished categorizing the pieces at the British Museum, I have to do the same thing for the Marble fragments in France, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Russia and Greece. Oh my!
After organizing the Elgin Marbles' metadata, I will input this information into Itinera itself.
Most of the Elgin Marbles are in the British Museum, but a large portion of the Marbles are still in Athens, Greece. The Musée du Louvre and the Vatican Museums house Marble fragments, and there are many Marbles at the National Museum in Copenhagen and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, according to my research. Still, a lot of the Marbles live in the University Museum in Würzburg and the Glyptothek in Munich. Earlier in December and January, the British Museum also lent a statue that was believed to be a representation of Ilissos to the St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum in Russia. So, the Elgin Marbles are pretty spread out throughout Europe.
Recording the metadata for the Elgin Marbles is tedious and rote - it takes hours to find the metadata and file it away for future use. The goal is to have all this information prepped and ready so that it can go into Itinera by the end of the semester. Seeing as it's taken me two weeks to file just the information for the British Museum, this is a lofty goal, but it is a goal nevertheless.
However, like I mentioned before, a great deal of the Marbles are at the British Museum, so then here are fewer fragments in these other museums. Theoretically, it should be much quicker to organize the rest of this information, so let's see how this goes.