Many things separate libraries,
archives and museums, but areas of common practice between these institutions
make collaboration entirely possible. From our reading and discussion in class
it has become clear that cultural heritage institutions have a desire to come
together and create modes of access for users across their collections.
Commonalities between libraries, archives, and museums include the management
of objects, metadata, and digitization. Additionally, all three types of
institutions have similar missions and responsibility to provide access to
their materials to the community.
In my experience, LAMs are already
interconnected in ways that should help facilitate collaboration with
individuals trained for specific cultural heritage institutions. For example,
the Museum of Fine Arts Boston maintains an extensive library of art historical
and other related texts, as well as an archive of lending correspondence and
other pertinent documents. The Simmons College archive is responsible for many
works of art relevant to the history of Simmons, and the permanent art
collection includes several rare books and print collections. These are just a
few small examples of how LAMs are connected, but it shows that these
institutions are not as different as they might like to think.
A uniting factor in LAMs today is
the move towards making their materials immediately available and as Murtha
Baca and Elizabeth O’Keefe discussed in their article, “the area of metadata standards
is experiencing a period of profound evolution” (Baca, 59). In this sense, LAMs
have more in common than they ever have, because each is evolving new ways of
reaching the public. Collaboration between LAMs will allow institutions to learn
from each other and adopt new, more efficient, practices. As we discussed
during the silos exercise, each type of cultural heritage institution has
something they can learn from the others, and also important information to
share.
An example of a project that shows
common practices in LAMs and how they can collaborate is the BAM project in
Germany, discussed in the Kirchhoff article. This portal, which we explored in
class, allows a user to search archives, libraries, and museums simultaneously,
and then directs them back to the website of the specific institution to which
the object belongs. According to this article, the common goal of LAMs is “the
preservation and presentation of cultural heritage” (Kirchhoff 252). BAM was
successful because it allowed institutions to take care of their own
preservation, and maintain records they way they found most useful, while the
portal presented it to the user in an easily accessible way.
Another example of an institution
that I think demonstrates areas of common practice is the Morgan Library and
Museum, which we discussed in class and also read about in the Baca article. This
article explains that the Morgan began with fragmented departments who all used
different cataloging techniques with different standards and purpose. By the
end of the project, the Morgan had consolidated all of their departments under
one cataloging system and online resource, and the Morgan’s librarians and
curators had benefitted in the ability to assess and revamp their records and
to learn from each other. The article went into detail the problems encountered
during this project and the differences between the two kinds of collections,
but by the end it was clear that because of the desire of the curators and
librarians to make a usable record, the Morgan was able to find similarities
and compromise.
These are just a few examples of
convergence in LAMs, and areas in which we can see common practices of
cataloging and digitizing with the goal of providing access. Common goals in
these institutions are what bring them together, despite the variety of their
collections, though as I have pointed out previously, there is not as much
separation as one might think.
References
Baca,
Murtha and O’Keefe, Elizabeth “Sharing Standards and Expertise in the Early 21st
Century: Moving Toward a Collaborative, ‘Cross-community’ Model for Metadata
Creation” ICBC 38 No. 4 (2009),
59-67.
Kirchhoff,
T., W. Schweibenz, and J. Sieglerschmidt. “Archives, Libraries, Museums and the
Spell of Ubiquitous Knowledge.” Archival Science 8, no. 4 (2008),
251-266
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