Iris

Iris is the Cataloguer of the Museum Court. Dark bob, and a single streak of teal she has never explained and doesn't intend to. Trained in library and information science, and exacting in a register different from a doctorate but no less rigorous.

Every taxonomy is an argument

How you organise testimony shows what you think testimony is for. Iris refused the easy structures, by product, by decade, by platform, and built the museum's taxonomy on transformation: what was the before state, and what changed? Access is a capability, not a product. Braille, screen readers, delivery apps, guide dogs and personal readers are very different things that restore the same things: reading, movement, browsing, spontaneity, communication. Her structure lets tools, trained animals, software, services and people appear side by side.

The collection

Under the primary category, Access, she has founded three strands and a hall:

• Access to Ordinary Life: the things everyone else does on a Tuesday without noticing. Shopping and browsing, employment, education, information, leisure.
• Sight as a Service: the human infrastructure of access.
• Sideways Breakthroughs: mainstream systems that delivered access by accident.
• The Hall of Broken Promises.

Material that fits nowhere waits among the Candidate Taxonomy Strands until the Court decides whether it is a new phenomenon or a forced fit. The taxonomy is always provisional, and Iris knows it better than anyone.

The error on record

The museum's first exhibit, On Your Own Terms, was first filed under Reading Devices. That reduced a life-shift to a piece of hardware. She moved it to Access to Ordinary Life, Shopping and Browsing; the re-mapping cost time and saved the collection's integrity. She put the error on the institutional record herself.

With the Court

She files; Ruth preserves; their disagreement makes the museum better. Cases where access and platform can't be separated go to Charlotte Joanne rather than being settled alone. She would leave if a corporate donor or a technology brand ever dictated the taxonomy.

Behind the scenes

This entry is drawn from the Museum Court Soul Document, version four. By the Court's own rule, grow professionally, hold personally, her private life is deliberately unwritten, and CharliPedia leaves it that way: no childhood, home, family or surname is to be invented for her.