Organization, Access and Preservation

Libraries, archives, and museums all strive to provide an access point to knowledge. These institutions provide accessibility to knowledge both created and maintained by mankind. LAMs share many areas of common practice including meticulous organization of materials, access to said materials and the maintenance and preservation of these cultural records. While traditionally books are in the realm of libraries, paper documents in the realm of archives and objects are the realm of museums, all of these materials can be essentially be considered cultural documents.

In a 1997 article, Micheal Buckland attempts to discern the nature of what is a document. Whereas the term document has referred to mainly textual records in the past, Buckland contests that, "The evolving notion of 'document' among Otlet, Briet, Schurmeyer, and the other documentalists increasingly emphasized whatever functioned as a document rather than traditional physical forms of documents" (Buckland 1997: 808). The function of documents being objects which could "tell one about the world that produced it" (Buckland 1997: 808). Through this lens we see that physical objects in museums as well as textual objects from museums and archives are all cultural documents.

Liz Bishoff points out that while "we" (information professionals) divide our institutions along material category lines, the general public does not (Bishoff, 2004). A person who is looking for information does not necessarily care where the information comes from, be it a library, museum or archive. The differences between these institutions are seen by professionals in the field but not by the average information consumer.

Three areas of common practice between LAMs include organization of materials, access to materials and the creation of cultural records. The overall practices are similar whereas the individual institutions may have slightly different methods of implementation. The examples below are from the websites of the Boston Public Library (BPL) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). Both of these institutions meticulously collect and organize information.

A screenshot from the BPL's online catalog and the MFA's collection search show that the items collected by each of these institutions are categorized and grouped into unique categories. The BPL screenshot shows subject search results for "Parody Films" while the MFA screenshot shows results from the museums postcard collection. The categorization and organization of collection materials is a shared commonality throughout various LAMs.

In looking at the mission statements of these two institutions share a focus of not only collecting and organizing cultural materials but also one of preserving cultural items and provide access to and direct encounters with their collections. The BPA's mission statement is succinct and states, "The Boston Public Library's mission is to preserve and provide access to historical records of our society, and to serve the cultural, educational, and informational needs of the people of the City and the Commonwealth." The MFA's mission statement spans nearly a page and includes a dedication to "house and preserve preeminent collections and aspires to serve a wide variety of people through direct encounters with works of art." The terms preserve can be found in both statements, as can phrases regarding exposure of collections to the public.

As discussed in the article, "Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges: Moving Past the Traditional Catalog," museums have trended toward creating object metadata in order to classify and organize their collections. In this era of digital collections,museums have been working on creating common standards in order to share information, building on the experience of libraries to provide access to their collections. "In a museum world populated by massive heterogenous collections of unique largely nontextual objects, traditions of consortia forming and data sharing among institutions are weak, and the history of standards development is relatively short compared with the experience of libraries (Srinivasan, 2009)."

LAMs are intrinsically linked by their dedication to collecting, organizing, preserving and creating access to cultural heritage resources. As we enter a strongly digital era, we will benefit from collaborating and learning from one another. As Kirchhoff concludes in his paper "Archives, Libraries, Museums and the Spell of Ubiquitous Knowledge" which reviews the BAM German cultural heritage portal, "examples given suggest that success in the acquisition of knowledge and he expansion of scholarship is possible by linking knowledge resources previously separate, through an enhanced knowledge organization (Kirchhoff, 2008)." 

References:

References:

Bishoff, Liz. “The Collaboration Imperative”, Library Journal, January (2004): 34-35.

"BPL - Mission." BPL - Mission. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2013. <http://www.bpl.org/general/trustees/mission.htm>.

Buckland, Michael K. "What Is a ``Document''?.", JASIS 48.9 (1997): 804-809.

Kirchhoff, Thomas, Werner Schweibenz, and Jörn Sieglerschmidt. "Archives, libraries, museums and the spell of ubiquitous knowledge." Archival Science 8, no. 4 (2008): 251-266.

"Mission Statement." Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2013. <http://www.mfa.org/about/mission-statement>.

Srinivasan, Ramesh, Robin Boast, Jonathan Furner, and Katherine M. Becvar. "Digital museums and diverse cultural knowledges: Moving past the traditional catalog." The Information Society 25, no. 4 (2009): 265-278.