Archives, Libraries, Museums: Coming Back Together?

Archives, Libraries, Museums: Coming Back Together?

Deanna Marcum

Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Volume 49, Number 1,2014, pp. 74-89 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Lomonosov Moscow State University (27 Jan 2014 10:11 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lac/summary/v049/49.1.marcum.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lac/summary/v049/49.1.marcum.html

74 I&C/Archives, Libraries, Museums: Coming Back Together?

Information & Culture, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2014©2014 by the University of Texas PressDOI: 10.7560/IC49105

Archives, Libraries, Museums: Coming Back Together?

Deanna Marcum

While libraries, archives, and museums have taken separate paths to professionalization, the digital environment, along with its many oppor-tunities for collaboration, is bringing these cultural institutions closer together, just as David Gracy projected early in his career. In the net-worked world, these siloed organizations with their unique professional histories are realizing that users of their content want information about subjects, not information from a particular source.

The many virtues for which we celebrate David Gracy in this issue include wisdom, particularly the kind of wisdom that enables him to see things whole, including interrelationships among ostensibly different cultural activities and agencies. In the preface to his history of the State Library and Archives of Texas, he gave us a delightful picture of himself as he pondered such a relationship. Entering the “office outfitted for the state archivist,” he wrote, he found it as “nicely appointed” as the state librarian’s office and “lavish by comparison with the offices of the other division directors.” This encouraged him to wonder, What was “the relationship between the library function and the archives/ records/history function”?1

From subsequent research he learned that he was not alone “in pon-dering the proper relationship.” But previous historians, he concluded, had failed to see the agency “as more than a collection of functions.” Instead, he called for “appreciating” it “as a single entity” and for man-aging it as “the special form of information agency in the United States that is a state library in full blossom.”2 And in his “welcome” to the first issue in which this journal took the new name Libraries & the Cultural

Deanna Marcum is managing director of Ithaka S+R, where she leads the research and consulting services that assist universities and colleges, libraries, publishers, and cultural institutions as they make the transition to the digital environment. From 2003 to 2011, she served as associate librarian for Library Services, Library of Congress.

75

Record, he described the work of archives, libraries, museums, and pres-ervation agencies as “fields uniting in the information domain and joined in the stewardship of the cultural record.”3

Recent history reveals a seeming explosion of conferences, forums, workshops, and other activities devoted to similar ideas. Themes have included not only inherent commonalities but also collaborative possibilities in the work of what some have taken to calling “LAMs”—li-braries, archives, and museums—or in Europe, “BAMS” (substituting the German Bibliotheken for libraries). In 2003 the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) sponsored papers at the World Library and Information Congress about “cooperation among ar-chives, libraries, and museums.”4 In 2004 the British Museum and the New York Public Library sponsored a meeting at the library entitled “Twenty-First Century Curatorship” to which they invited library, mu-seum, and other information professionals.5 That year, the Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Michigan, held a special conference for archivists and curators from history museums and historical societies.6 In 2005 the Research Libraries Group (RLG) produced a forum entitled “Libraries, Archives, & Museums—Three-Ring Circus, One Big Show?”7 Out of this came a blog called “Hanging Together” for supporters of institutional partnerships who wished to “talk about the intersections we see happening between these different types of institutions.”8 In 2006 the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries sponsored a conference in Austin, Texas, en-titled “Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Twenty-First Century: Intersecting Missions, Converging Futures.”9 In 2007 RLG began devel-oping workshops in five major institutions in Scotland, England, and the United States, out of which came proposals for ten LAM cooperative projects.10 In 2008 the Cultural Heritage Information Professionals put on a workshop about “the shared information needs and challenges fac-ing libraries, archives, and museums in the information age,” which led to special issues on the subject in journals in each of those three fields.11

The list continues—panels on LAM partnerships at annual meet-ings of the American Library Association, the American Association of Museums, and the Society of American Archivists; workshops “in cam-pus and campus-like environments” for LAM professionals; and projects to “help bridge the gap” between institutional differences in data cata-loging and address other “common roadblocks that prevent deeper LAM collaborations.”12

Out of such events came expressions of shifts of attitude. One heard talk of special collections libraries as “museums of the book,”13 of


“leveraging” library objects to create exhibits, of “learning to tell sto-ries” with library materials.14 But the explosion of interest produced more than talk. Numerous actual collaborations of LAMs began—so numerous that in 2008 IFLA issued a special report that tried to survey, categorize, and assess them. The report described “three general types of partnerships”: “collaborative programming”; “partnerships to create digital resources”; and “colocations of partners,” meaning the establish-ment of “joint-use/integrated facilities.”15

This impressive taxonomy of LAM collaboration further described multiple levels of closeness within each of the three main categories. The report broke the category of “collaborative programming” into two types: “community and heritage programs,” of which the report gave twelve examples; and programs in which libraries provided free passes to institutions such as museums, described with five examples. The report divided the second category of closeness—the development of “collab-orative electronic resources”—into four categories based on geographic scale. It described sixteen “regional and local initiatives,” nine “national initiatives,” four “continental initiatives,” and one “global initiative” (the World Digital Library). At the highest category of closeness, the report described instances in which cultural institutions or programs had gone so far as to integrate, either minimally (seven examples), selectively (three examples), or fully (four examples).16

The numbers of examples under the three divisions and nine subcategories totaled sixty-one. The examples came from thirteen countries—Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The report’s authors felt able to begin describing “best practices” for institutional partnerships, stages for “successful col-laboration,” and pointers on collaboration’s “benefits and risks.” Surely all this is enough to raise the prospect that our era in cultural agency history will go down as one of exceptional collaborative enthusiasm.17

Examples of partnership projects illustrate their range. Some projects are small, local, and undertaken by people without extensive experience, such as the “Unnetie [sic] Project” described by Elizabeth Anne Melrose of North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. There a library, a museum, a local historical society, and a county record office decided to digitize a little-known archive of local photography, producing a searchable website of images “illustrating life in the region.”18 Ruth Hedegaard, a li-brarian in Denmark, has described “NOKS,” a collaboration of no fewer than nine archives, libraries, and museums holding materials of varied kinds. The partners are making it possible to search those holdings in

77

one place without going through nine separate institutions.19 Germany has established a “joint portal of archives, libraries, and museums” across that entire country.20 The digital library called Europeana has been planning to provide access to digital resources of libraries, muse-ums, archives, and audiovisual collections across the continent.21

Not all the LAM partnerships depend on digital technology. The Indianapolis–Marion County library system set up a branch in the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis. The Museum of Art in the Rhode Island School of Design collaborated with the Providence Public Library system to support artists in library-based community residencies. And the Howe Library of Hanover, New Hampshire, collaborated with the Montshire Museum of Norwich, Vermont, to develop small museum ex-hibits for rural public libraries.22

Major impetus for the growth of collaborative projects in the United States has come from the federal government’s Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The institute itself came out of a merger of two previously independent organizations, one making grants to museums, and the other to libraries. In 1998 the IMLS began a special program to encourage and fund library-museum partnerships, particularly those, in the words of former IMLS director Robert S. Martin, that “help mu-seums and libraries take a leadership role in the education of lifelong learners in the twenty-first century.”23

IMLS grants have enabled libraries and museums to partner not only with each other but also with other kinds of cultural institutions, including historical societies and schools. These grants have helped collaborating institutions create traveling exhibits, learning modules, community cultural heritage databases, multimedia web-based exhibits, links between institutions’ websites, online aggregations of images, and other kinds of collaborative digitization projects using material from multiple collections. Martin championed such collaborations, declaring that “digital information technology has dramatically affected the way we now perceive the differences and similarities of such institutions and has blurred the boundaries between them.”24

National organizations in other countries also have given rise to col-laborations among cultural institutions. In the United Kingdom as early as 2001, Christopher Marsden reported, “co-operation between the archival and curatorial worlds” was “increasing significantly, led by the ef-forts of the Standing Conference on Archives and Museums (SCAM).”25 In 2004 the Canadian government merged its National Library and National Archives into one organization called Library and Archives Canada, providing a “single government focus for the management of


Canadian documentary heritage.” “Dwindling resources” had a lot to do with the merger, but so did a conviction, encouraged by digital tech-nology, that “what archives and library professions had in common with one another was greater and more important than what distinguished them.” As with IMLS in the United States, the Canadian merger brought with it a new commitment to “foster lifelong learning.”26

The need for integration also arises from a need to save money. This is what some advocates of collaborations have called “the economies of scale” argument. The “Great Recession” of the past few years, reducing tax revenues, endowment earnings, and donor capabilities, has put pres-sure on cultural agencies, public and private, to pare budgets and seek efficiencies. The latter include “stretching lean funds by jointly shoulder-ing investments around common functions” in partnership activities.27

Even more important to cultural agency collaboration may be bluntly described as the fear of irrelevance. Ruth Hedegaard has explained: “Most of our users do not care where they find their information, whether it is in a book or a leaflet in the library, from a description of an artefact [sic] in the museum, or from an organisation’s protocol in the archives, as long as they do find it.”28 Archivists, librarians, and mu-seum professionals have seen users gravitate to the Web. Students find it easier to “Google” than to go to the library. Scholars look to special-ized Internet portals, which they find more convenient than traveling to and sitting in archives. And members of the general public may ignore museums in favor of all the audiovisual attractions and opportunities for interactivity accessible on their handheld or laptop devices. For an indi-vidual library, archives, or museum, putting digital copies of its holdings on its website makes accessibility easier, but that does not reduce the number of institutional “silos” that users have to hunt through for what they want. Cooperating with other institutions to pool digital resources can reduce the need for silo searching.29

The need to compete for public attention, the desire to save money, and the encouragement of government grants have all played a part in stimulating the rise in cultural agency collaborations. But so has some-thing else. LAMs are partnering in new ways because they now can. Digital technology has opened avenues to new kinds of service—and to better ones. “Our goal,” as Ruth Hedegaard has put it, “must be to give people the opportunity to search archives, libraries, and museums si-multaneously.”30 LAMs could not conveniently do that before. Because they now can make their materials available beyond their walls, they can serve audiences they previously never had. Digital technology expands their power to create and sustain not just learners that come to them but, in Robert Martin’s words, “a nation of learners,” indeed a world of

79

learners, extending “education into an enterprise that lasts a lifetime.”31 It is not just education that LAMs can extend. Particularly with museums in the mix, they can extend experiences—experiences of the beautiful, the rare, the poignant, the extraordinary, the amazing, the stimulating, the provocative. However, as anyone actually engaged in a “cooperative” project knows, potential obstacles exist. First, they require investments of money, energy, and time. Eager to be good colleagues, or to join with prestigious company, or to please university presidents and provosts who have also become enthralled with collaboration, we may find ourselves joining collaborative enterprises without doing the hard work of evaluat-ing whether potential returns are worth it. Collaboration is a potentially effective strategy, not a feel-good panacea. Collaborations also must face the fact that archives, libraries, and museums lack common standards for describing data, have different methods of cataloging holdings, and take different approaches to object registration. “Cross institutional collaborations are nearly impossible,” Deborah Wythe of the Brooklyn Museum has written, “without solid progress in agreement on standards.”32 Fortunately, considerable work on descriptive standards and the sharing of metadata in projects involv-ing libraries, archives, and museums has been going forward.33

Partnering may falter also because different institutions have differ-ent expectations of users. Museum visitors, for example, are less likely to come in search of particular kinds of information or specific objects than visitors to archives and libraries. Archives visitors may need more professional guidance. They are not normally “let loose in the stacks.” Exhibits are usually central to museums but ancillary elements of ar-chives and libraries. Professionals from different kinds of institutions trying to partner must recognize that they serve different communities, make different assumptions about service, even speak with different, spe-cialized vocabularies, and often have had different kinds of education.34 As Canadian administrator Michelle Doucet dramatically observed: “A sink-or-swim approach [to collaboration] will polarize your professional staff. If you throw librarians and archivists and museums professionals in a room and tell them to get along and play nicely, they will not.”35

Moreover, as in other kinds of collaborative activities, communi-cations can be unclear, commitments uncertain, and expectations misunderstood. Participants may not all uphold their parts or meet their deadlines. They may not even have the capacity to do so. Projects can be upset by both external and internal resistance. And a project’s results may turn out to be unacceptable to those for whom they are intended. Doucet describes the reply of a historian who was asked how he would


feel about doing research online. “He reacted very strongly against the concept,” declaring, “‘I would then have to trust whoever digitized those records, and I could never do that.’”36 The fact that researchers with similar concerns in an earlier era had eventually accepted microfilm gave him hope.37

Cooperating institutions have been able to overcome such obstacles and realize many rewards. Besides benefits most often sought, such as cost savings, collections enlargement, access simplification, and greater outreach, some collaborators report increased visibility for their own institutions, the attraction of new audiences, and changes in public per-ceptions that their organizations had been traditional, elitist, or closed to most people. Moreover, sharing resources has sometimes led cooper-ating partners to create new programs or services that none could have undertaken alone.38

Some kinds of collaboration are proving relatively easy, such as part-nering in the creation of exhibits, which are central to museums but also found in display spaces in many archives and libraries. Others, such as full mergers of collections of libraries, archives, and museums, may be extremely difficult. Whatever the level of difficulty, bringing the fields together may in the long run require changes in professional education. Already educators such as Fernanca Ribeiro have proposed alternatives to traditional courses that treat archives and libraries as separate areas of specialization.39 As the cooperative spirit among cultural institutions continues to grow, it may force changes even beyond those already evident in the curricula of schools of library and information science, among others. For those of us concerned with the history of cultural institutions, the collaborative movement takes on an additional dimension. Some of its proponents read history to say that, in our era’s partnering, we are not just bringing together collections, programs, or institutions. We are recombining cultural resource fields and curatorial service professions that have too long been separated. Consider what has been called “The Case of the Curious Collector Myron Eells.” That title has been given by archivist and scholar Michael J. Paulus, Jr., to his fascinating historical study of a man who assembled a major col-lection of material on the history of America’s Pacific Northwest.40 Born in 1843, Eells grew up on the West Coast in a family of missionaries. In 1868 he traveled to Hartford Theological Seminary and, while in the East, found occasion to visit repositories of cultural collections such as the libraries of Yale and Williams, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution. He also gained admission to private collections reminiscent of the “cabinets of curiosities” that knowledge seekers had

81

been assembling since the sixteenth century. These contained mixtures of natural specimens, mechanical objects, artworks, books, manuscripts, and, in many American cabinets, artifacts of Native Americans. By the time Eells returned home as a missionary to the Skokomish Reservation, he had started a collection of his own on the history and peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Over the years his collection grew to hundreds of books, artifacts, manuscripts, and much else, including correspondence with and transcriptions of interviews with Oregon missionaries. After Eells died in 1907, his family donated much of this collec-tion, including his “Indian curios,” to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Through the twentieth century, this collection became dis-persed. As Paulus explains,

The Whitman College LAM programs grew and settled into their separate professional trajectories. Books were cataloged and shelved according to Library of Congress standards, ready to be circulated; records were inventoried and filed or shelved as items or groups of items, ready to be paged to a dedicated reading room; and artifacts were registered in a database and stored, ready to be exhibited in a separate facility. Today . . . locating items that Eells collected requires searching a library catalog, a number of finding aids, and the museum’s collection management system. Not every-thing, of course, is locatable or still at Whitman.41

The Eells story symbolizes the general dispersal of mixed collections that occurred in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries “as knowl-edge became more specialized and its pursuit more professionalized.” In our time, digital technology could make possible the reuniting of the Eells collection, restoring “organic connections” among its varied elements and presenting “related material collectively,” as Paulus says, through the engagement of archivists, librarians, and museum curators in “cross-domain collaborations.” Digitization can enable us to reas-semble the collection as Eells knew it and to draw on all of its varied elements as he had done.42

The idea that our era’s collaborations among archives, libraries, and museums can constitute a return to a unity that has been lost for a century or two recurs in literature on the subject. With variations, pro-ponents make the argument along the following lines. “Long-standing epistemological links” exist between libraries, archives, and museums, whose “current convergence” marks “a return to tradition rather than a departure from it.”43 For some writers, “the dream of collecting all kinds of media in one repository” can be traced to ancient origins: “Archives,


libraries, and museums have a common ancestor: the ‘Mouseion’ (its Greek name) of Alexandria.”44 Ptolemy Soter I established the Alexandrian “Museum” with a great library for the use of scholars, poets, and others in service to the Muses. Terms changed in meaning over time, but “in practice, there was little practical differentiation be-tween library and museum until the early modern period.”45 Similarly, to thinkers in the Renaissance, “knowledge and objects of all kinds” for study “belonged together.”46

This remained the general view of the learned European gentlemen who, as early as the sixteenth century, began creating “cabinets of curi-osities.” These contained everything that their owners found interesting and useful for contemplation and study. As an enthusiast once put it, such a collector should have “a goodly huge cabinet, wherein what-soever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included.”47

In time, the story continues, cracks in the unified face of collecting began to appear. The development of printing increased the quantity as well as the availability of books. The “rational bureaucratization of governments” led to the separation of official records from other kinds of documents.48 Expanding collections outgrew their cabinets and, by the eighteenth century, became more specialized in subjects, objects, places, or times to make them more manageable.49 Housing for them split off into archives, museums, and libraries, each focusing on a differ-ent form of information and on users of different kinds. Slowly, professionalism within these collecting institutions evolved. Starting in the late nineteenth century, separate professional societies appeared: in 1876 the American Library Association, in 1906 the Ameri-can Association of Museums, in 1936 the Society of American Archivists. The latter came out of the American Historical Association, founded in 1884, as did the American Association for State and Local History, representing historical societies, in 1940. These associations held their own conferences, published their own journals, and created their own professional standards and codes of ethics.50 And separate educational programs developed to teach what had become the methodological par-ticularities of each field. Thus in the twentieth century the separation of professions as well as of types of collecting institutions became complete. These developments, the argument continues, serve institutions better than their users: “What has developed does not reflect the needs of an individual scholar or member of the educated public interested in some

83

aspect of learning or life. For the individual the ideal is still the personal cabinet of curiosities that contains whatever is needed for a particular purpose or to respond to a particular interest, irrespective of the nature of the artefacts [sic] involved.”51 Do the events of the past decade, gener-ating an impressive wave of collaboration, as we have seen, warrant the historical status envisioned in this scenario? Let us look more closely at the historical relations of archives, libraries, and museums. “Almost as far back as it was possible to see in human affairs,” James M. O’Toole has written, “the care of records had been essential to social or-ganization.”52 The development of settled communities, city-states, and empires in the ancient world brought with it a need for written records to document laws, decrees, diplomatic agreements, judicial rulings, meeting outcomes, property ownership, taxes, military service, and con-tracts, among much else. Archaeologists have unearthed such archival records from Egypt, Crete, Assyria, and elsewhere dating at least to the seventh century BCE. Ancient bureaucrats maintained systematic col-lections of records resembling modern archives, storing them in rooms in palaces and temples. These collections sometimes came to include what we would call literary or library works, though the ancients would not have made that distinction. “Archival documents mingled with library material” were found at Nineveh, where Ashurbanipal ruled an-cient Assyria. These included “omen texts,” which we might consider religious literature but at the time could have been records of great importance to the operation of government. In classical Athens, state policy mandated the preservation of uncorrupted copies of the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, treating them as documentary records in the state’s archives. Nonetheless, separations appeared in an-tiquity, even in Nineveh, where excavators discovered “protolibraries” distinct from administrative records. Also in some places different tech-niques seem to have developed for controlling holdings of libraries and of archives even when preserved in the same repositories.53

In the classical world, Aristotle considered archives to be offices indis-pensable for a model state, and they spread throughout the Greek cities, which understood the importance of documentation functions. These archives were separate from public libraries, which the Greeks intro-duced and housed in connection with gymnasiums, where Greeks went for athletic and military training. Pollio built Rome’s first public library, which the murdered Julius Caesar had planned, and other libraries opened to the public near the imperial public baths. As such libraries grew, they themselves began to separate into sections for Greek and for Latin writings. The Romans set up government archives separate from


libraries, sometimes in temples near public buildings, and Justinian ordered the creation of a public building for records storage in every province in the empire.54

As for museums, in the ancient world the term usually applied to religious temples for the worship of the Muses. As early as the sixth century BCE, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, Nabonidus, established a museum-like collection of inscriptions and antiquities at Ur. The famous Mouseion at Alexandria, however, served as a place for cultivating arts symbolized by antiquity’s nine Muses. As mentioned pre-viously, the Ptolemies invited writers, poets, scientists, and scholars to work there and provided a library for their use, along with a second library primarily of basic literary classics, made more widely available. The Mouseion did have some objects, such as statues of thinkers, astro-nomical and surgical instruments, elephant trunks, animal hides, and a botanical and zoological park, but, as Edward Alexander has said, “it was chiefly a university or philosophical academy—a kind of institute of advanced study.”55 The Greeks and Romans also had some public collec-tions of objects of aesthetic, historic, or religious importance, including artworks and offerings on view in temples and public displays of booty from conquests. But the modern museum, in the words of a British scholar, “is a product of Renaissance humanism, eighteenth-century en-lightenment, and nineteenth-century democracy.”56 The sixteenth-century cabinets of curiosities did contain mixed col-lections, swelled by explorers’ trips and scientific experimentation. In time, however, such collections gravitated into universities. Among the earliest examples, in 1589 a collection of coins and “antiquities” came to Cambridge University’s library donated by Andrew Perne, master of Peterhouse. In the seventeenth century, a collection of manuscripts and “natural and artificial rareties” from a family named Tradescant and manuscripts and rarities belonging to Elias Ashmole came to Oxford University.57 This was just twelve years after what is generally regarded as the first university museum opened in Basil, Switzerland. Additional materials came to universities from “well-traveled alumni” who swelled early museums with an Egyptian mummy, a war canoe model, a small alligator, hummingbirds, Canadian snowshoes, and the New Testament in Chinese.58 The Vatican established museums around 1750, and the English Parliament’s purchase of a large collection from Sir Hans Sloane in 1753 became the basis of the British Museum.59

Social and political developments also spurred the rise of large cul-tural institutions. Napoleon’s conquests brought great quantities of confiscated artworks to France, which turned the Palace of the Louvre into a museum to hold them, giving rise to the concept of a national

85

museum as a demonstration of national glory.60 In the United States, the Charleston Museum opened in 1773 along with Charles Willson Peale’s famous museum in Philadelphia. Patriotic organizations, among oth-ers, established museums. Once the public was admitted, the exhibition function became dominant. A French commentator called American museums “the university of the common man.”61

With similar sentiments, wealthy community leaders promoted librar-ies in the growing cities: the Boston Public Library in 1858 and the New York Public Library in 1911. Eventually, with the philanthropic help of Andrew Carnegie, public libraries came to nearly every town. To some historians, these developments reflected progressive beliefs in the ca-pacity of ordinary citizens for self-education and self-improvement and fostered the acculturation and assimilation of growing numbers of im-migrants.62 To other historians, the development of cultural institutions for mass use reflected a fear of radical change and a desire for stabi-lization.63 Whatever the motives, the growth of libraries, archives, and museums made more evident their increasing separation. But is that entirely true? Institutions with multiple and diverse col-lections also have grown. In the late nineteenth century, Woburn, Massachusetts, opened a building with a museum at one end and a li-brary at another.64 In the early twentieth century, the Newark Museum displayed books and objects together. In England, the Victoria and Albert Museum came to house large libraries and specialist archival reposito-ries as well as its famous artifact collections. In the United States, the Smithsonian Institution became an umbrella for multiple museums, re-search centers, libraries, archives, and even a national zoo. The National Archives and Records Administration oversaw a steadily expanding net-work of presidential libraries and museums and in recent years launched a major exhibition program and built exhibits about the US Constitution and Bill of Rights in the archival building that houses them. Also, one must remember that throughout the past couple of cen-turies and more, hundreds of historical societies across America have preserved all kinds of objects within single jurisdictions. Local histori-cal societies often combine exhibits of artifacts, libraries of historical and genealogical information, and archives of photographs, maps, and documents. And the now-large state historical societies, following the “Wisconsin model” of wide outreach to the public, combine substantial libraries and archives with museums and historic sites within their indi-vidual domains. The historian John Alexander Williams has given us a fascinating analysis of how, within historical societies, emphases kept changing.65 American historical societies began as private learned clubs in which


individuals often pooled their personal cabinets of collections for use by all members. Historical societies then began to adopt what Williams calls a “library model” in the service of scholarship. Later came a “pro-gressive model” in which historical societies expanded into educational institutions, serving public audiences through museums and historic sites. In the twentieth century, a “museum model” came to dominate, to the consternation of gentleman scholars such as Walter Muir Whitehill, who, surveying historical societies in the 1960s, attributed their museum developments to “a touching national belief that the more people one can induce to mill about in a limited space the better.”66

One can argue that the continued presence within some individual institutions of archival, library, and museum collections does not mean they are integrated. Some of those who look to cabinets of curiosities as a model urge cultural institutions such as libraries and museums to combine their collections and even physically merge. Doing so would enable them to create a “broad information context” and a “dynamic inter disciplinary environment.”67 Whether or not we desire full mergers, we certainly can combine digital representations of diverse collections for the benefit of all who seek knowledge. And we are doing that. The appeal to history—to the idea that the growth of collaborative en-deavors among archives, libraries, and other cultural institutions in the past decade signifies a welcome return to a kind of golden age, whether in the era of the great Mouseion of ancient Alexandria or the more re-cent time of cabinets of curiosities—may be questionable, as we have seen. But in a sense, our computers are cabinets of curiosities. Through their Internet-connected search buttons, we can bring to our indi-vidual inquiries multiple kinds of information from multiple sources. The growing collaborations of our era make that increasingly possible. However one reads the past, today’s information technologies open op-portunities never equaled before to make the world’s cultural heritage accessible, usable, and valuable. Like David Gracy in his archival office, we have begun to see well beyond the confines of functional divides.

Notes

1. David B. Gracy II, preface to The State Library and Archives of Texas: A History, 1835–1962 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), xiii–xiv.

2. Ibid., xiv, xxii.3. David B. Gracy II, “Welcome to the Premier Issue,” Libraries & the Cultural

Record 41, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 295, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/libraries _and_culture/v041/41.3gracy.html.

4. See http://www.ifla.org/node/1402.

87

5. Christian Dupont, “Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Twenty-First Century: Intersecting Missions, Converging Futures,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage 8, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 14.

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Günter Waibel, “Libraries, Archives and Museums Hanging Together??!,”

from the blog “Hanging Together,” July 23, 2007, http://hangingtogether.org /?p=240.

9. Dupont, “Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” 13.10. Diane M. Zorich, Günter Waibel, and Ricky Erway, “Beyond the Silos

of the LAMs: Collaboration among Libraries, Archives and Museums,” report produced by OCLC Programs and Research, 2008, 8–9, http://www.oclc.org /programs/reports/2008-05.pdf. The workshop sites were Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale University.

11. Paul F. Marty, “An Introduction to Digital Convergence: Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Information Age,” Library Quarterly 80, no. 1 ( January 2010): 1, http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/648549. The journals in which follow-up articles appeared were Library Quarterly, Archival Science, and Museum Management and Curatorship.

12. Zorich, Waibel, and Erway, “Beyond the Silos,” 7.13. Dupont, “Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” 14.14. Waibel, “Libraries, Archives and Museums.”15. Alexandra Yarrow, Barbara Clubb, and Jennifer-Lynn Draper, “Public

Libraries, Archives and Museums: Trends in Collaboration and Cooperation,” IFLA professional report 108, 2008.

16. Ibid.17. Ibid.18. Elizabeth Anne Melrose, “If We Can Do It, So Can You: The U.K. North

Yorkshire Digitisation Project,” paper delivered to the World Library and Infor-mation Congress, Berlin, August 2003, http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers /067e-Melrose.pdf/.

19. Ruth Hedegaard, “Benefits of Archives, Libraries and Museums Work-ing Together,” paper delivered to the World Library and Information Congress, Berlin, August 2003, http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/051f_trans-Hede gaard.pdf/.

20. Thomas Kirchhoff, Werner Schweibenz, and Jorn Sieglerschmidt, “Ar-chives, Libraries, Museums, and the Spell of Ubiquitous Knowledge,” Archival Science 8, no. 4 (December 2008): 251, 256.

21. Sally Chambers and Wouter Shallier, “Bringing Research Libraries into Europeana: Establishing a Library-Domain Aggregator,” Liber Quarterly 20, no. 1 (September 2010), 105–6.

22. David Carr, “Observing Collaborations between Libraries and Museums,” Curator: The Museum Journal 46, no. 2 (April 2003): 123, http://onlinelibrary .wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2003.tb00081.x/abstract.

23. Tom Storey, “Libraries: Their Role and Relationship to Other Cultural Institutions, Interview with Bob Martin,” OCLC Newsletter, April 2003, 14.

24. Robert S. Martin, “Cooperation and Change: Archives, Libraries, and Museums in the United States,” paper presented at the World Library and


Information Congress, Berlin, 2003, p. 1, http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla69 /papers/066e-Martin.pdf/. For descriptions of IMLS-funded projects, see also Nancy Allen, “Collaboration through the Colorado Digitization Project,” First Monday 5, no. 6 (5 June 2000), http://frodo.lib.uic.edu/ojsjournals/index.php /fm/article/view/755/664; Nuala A. Bennett, Beth Sandore, and Evangeline S. Pianfetti, “Illinois Digital Cultural Heritage Community—Collaborative Inter-actions among Libraries, Museums, and Elementary Schools,” D-Lib Magazine 8, no. 1 ( January 2002), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/bennett/01bennett .html; Juris Dilevko and Lisa Gottlieb, “Resurrecting a Neglected Idea: The Re-introduction of Library-Museum Hybrids,” Library Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2003); and the IMLS website.

25. Christopher Marsden, “Sectors and Domains: Some Reflections on Co-operation and Integration,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 22, no. 1 (2001): 18.

26. Michelle Doucet, “Library and Archives Canada: A Case Study of a National Library, Archives, and Museum Merger,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage 8, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 61–62, 64.

27. Zorich, Waibel, and Erway, “Beyond the Silos,” 6.28. Hedegaard, “Benefits of Archives,” 2.29. The relevance problem is discussed in Zorich, Waibel, and Erway, “Be-

yond the Silos,” 13–15; and in Dilevko and Gottlieb, “Resurrecting a Neglected Idea,” 161.

30. Hedegaard, “Benefits of Archives,” 1.31. Martin, “Cooperation,” 2; Storey, “Libraries,” 13.32. Deborah Wythe, “New Technologies and the Convergence of Libraries,

Archives, and Museums,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage 8, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 52.

33. Mary W. Elings and Günter Waibel, “Metadata for All: Descriptive Stan-dards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” First Monday 12, no. 3 (March 2007), http://frodo.lib.uic.edu/ojsjournals/index .php/fm/article/view/1628/1543, or http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3 /elings/index.html.

34. For a discussion of differences, see Dupont, “Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” 13–19. Also see Martin, “Cooperation,” 5–6.

35. Doucet, “Library and Archives Canada,” 66.36. Ibid., 64.37. For descriptions of problems identified in this paragraph, see Guy

St. Clair, “From Special Library to Organizational Nexus,” Information Outlook 10, no. 1 ( January 2006): 44; Bozena Rasmussen and Tord Høivik, “Library Innovation Is Hard Work: Lessons from a Norwegian Case Study,” IFLA pa-per, http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/096e_trans-Rasmussen.pdf; and Melrose, “If We Can Do It.”

38. For a more detailed summary of “benefits and risks of LAM collabora-tions,” see Yarrow, Clubb, and Draper, “Public Libraries,” 35–36.

39. Fernanca Ribeiro, “An Integrated Perspective for Professional Education in Libraries, Archives, and Museums: A New Paradigm, a New Training Model,” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 48, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 123.

40. Michael J. Paulus, Jr., “The Converging Histories and Futures of Libraries, Archives, and Museums as Seen through the Case of the Curious Collector Myron Eells,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 46, no. 2 (2011): 185–205.

41. Ibid., 194.

89

42. Ibid., 196–97.43. Lisa M. Given and Lianne McTavish, “What’s Old Is New Again: The Re-

convergence of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Digital Age,” Library Quarterly 80, no. 1 ( January 2010): 7.

44. Kirchhoff, Schweibenz, and Sieglerschmidt, “Archives, Libraries, Muse-ums,” 252.

45. Martin, “Cooperation,” 3.46. Kirchhoff, Schweibenz, and Sieglerschmidt, “Archives, Libraries, Muse-

ums,” 252.47. Francis Bacon quoted in G. G. Charnes, “Museums, Archives, and Librar-

ies: Estranged Siblings,” 1997, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry .com/~gilliamgibbswritings/musarchlib.html.

48. Martin, “Cooperation,” 3.49. Paulus, “The Converging Histories,” 187.50. William Aspray, “The History of Information Science and Other Tra-

ditional Information Domains: Models for Future Research,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 46, no. 2 (2011): 235.

51. W. Boyd Rayward, quoted in Charnes, “Museums, Archives, and Librar-ies,” 2.

52. James M. O’Toole, introduction to Archives in the Ancient World, by Ernst Posner (repr., Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2003), xv.

53. Information in this paragraph comes from Posner, Archives, 3, 27–28, 110; Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 11; and O’Toole, introduction, xii–xiii, xv, xvii, xxv.

54. Information in this paragraph comes from Casson, Libraries, 17, 58, 60, 80, 89, 100–101; and Posner, Archives, 92, 114, 129, 160, 169–70, 220.

55. Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1979), 6.

56. J. Mordaunt Crook quoted in ibid., 8. Material not otherwise cited in this paragraph is from ibid., 6–8.

57. Paulus, “The Converging Histories,” 125. Also see Charnes, “Museums, Archives, and Libraries,” 2.

58. Dilevko and Gottlieb, “Resurrecting a Neglected Idea,” 179–80. Also see Paulus, “The Converging Histories,” 187.

59. Alexander, Museums in Motion, 8.60. Ibid.61. Ibid., 11–15. The commentator was Germain Bazin, a curator at the Louvre.62. Jesse H. Shera, Foundations of the Public Library: The Origins of the Public Li-

brary Movement in New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 248.63. Michael H. Harris, “The Purpose of the American Public Library: A

Revisionist Interpretation,” Library Journal 98 (1973): 2509–14.64. Dilevko and Gottlieb, “Resurrecting a Neglected Idea,” 182.65. John Alexander Williams, “American Historical Societies: Notes for a Sur-

vey,” in A Culture at Risk: Who Cares for America’s Heritage?, ed. Charles Phillips and Patricia Hogan (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1984), 5–24.

66. Walter Muir Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1962).

67. Dilevko and Gottlieb, “Resurrecting a Neglected Idea,” 163, 190.

Documents

Archives, Libraries, Museums: Coming Back Together?