Organization of Information (Library and Information Science)
In the 21st century, there has been growing interesting on how information is organized and managed at museums so as to enhance the museum for museum visitors or users of museum resources and museum professionals. Many museum professionals are grappling with new information management challenges such as reaching decisions pertaining to content management software, and selection of metadata standards relating to sharing information with other organizations. Museum visitors today come with new expectations relating to the resources museums ought to provide, posing questions that demand an unprecedented level of information access. Therefore, museums are facing an information revolution, having to integrate a variety of different information resources, tools, technologies, and information management skills, ranging from the museum’s collections to information about the objects, to information on the contexts in which the objects are exhibited, studies, or interpreted. It must be admitted that the relationship between museums as institutions, museum professionals, and indeed museum visitors is constantly evolving to respond to the evolving demands and challenges of information organization, accessibility, management, and use of museum resources.
Information organization at Museums
The mission of a museum is to organize its information objects, artifacts and data for the user access and enlightenment. Museums and archives have relatively different metadata standards and procedures for managing their collections as well as unique information and service concerns (Blackaby & Sandore, 1997). Museums have disparate forms and ways in which they collect and give meaning to the contextual materials they maintain.
An art museum, for instance, would have information and sketches drawn from sketchbooks and diaries pertaining to a painting that is no longer in public domain, or a collection of books on the artist. Therefore, the objects and research and documents and records form the fabric of information that give an object life in a museum (Marty & Jones, 2012). While some resources may be of greater significance than others, the museum information manager hardly discards any of them. This implies that managing museum information is a more challenging endevour as compared to monitoring a stationery store or designing a consumer’s spending habits profile (Blackaby & Sandore, 1997).
The proliferation of digital technologies in the recent past has revolutionized the ways in which museums create, organize, preserve, and provide access to their digital collections for the audience. Increasingly museums are converging their information management and organization efforts and their cultural silos are being rendered more transparent for users. Recent growth in general public interest, research needs, and institutional mandates have made museums to rethink their organizations of collections much the same as the traditional ways of libraries and archives (Marty & Jones, 2012). In this regard, museums are increasingly adopting metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, the Getty vocabularies, and content standards such as Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) in an effort to better organize and propagate their collections’ information. Generally, the organization of information at an art museum is done based on topic because there are usually less variations in the type of collections. As such, the topical organization at an art museum often takes into consideration chronological, geographical, or stylistic similarity (Blackaby & Sandore, 1997).
A museum places greater significance on the information of the origin of an object or gathering of objects because it is crucial in establishing the name together with other aspects describing that specific object. The origin and physical condition of the acquired object are included along other information pertaining to the object listed in the catalog or registration record (Alexander et al, 2008). Accumulation of information about a particular object is collected over a period of time, and description of textual material is often less difficult relative to visual material.
Museums today are making use of integrated information systems in the organization of their information. The integrated systems allows the museum to gather metadata from a number of legacy systems with the institution and create new databases for public use (Marty & Jones, 2012). The new database do not need to be maintained because the legacy system are still used as production system within the museum. The database is refreshed on a periodic basis. In addition, the database as a file can be searched in number of different ways, enabling the museum to create links within related types of information across different departments, eliminating the need of re-structuring the museum’s internal production systems (Blackaby & Sandore, 1997). As such, the ideal integrated system is able to retrieve directly from individual production databases within the organization, incurring relatively less overhead in terms of formatting and linking the information between related information across systems. This approach that enables a museum community to have a diversity of data formats as well as classification schemes is crucial considering the increasing need to protect the contextual validity and meaning of information, along with avoiding high costs of undertaking large-scale conversion and re-creation of the metadata already in place (Alexander et al, 2008).
A plan to draw together unrelated pieces information using a single integrated system entails visualizing and preparing data into a format usable for many purposes as opposed to the traditional one specific purpose. Materials collected from museum activities (e.g. exhibits) are considered and incorporated with other information available in the organization. Likewise, information relating to collections that extend to a number of institutions are integrated into the blend of resources (Alexander et al, 2008). The data is organized from the onset and treated as a whole so as to accommodate all possibilities of an integrated system, enabling easy accessibility of the public to the information at the museum.
As relates to proper organizing of information in a museum, the biggest responsibility lays with the museum professions. These people are responsible for exceptionally large number of information resources ranging including physical museum artifacts and electronic documents relating to museum collections. Museum professionals are relying on principles of information representation in creating information aggregates or surrogates easily manipulated because managing museum resources in their original form is often difficult and time-consuming (Marty & Jones, 2012). Surrogates stem from the effort of taking information entities and compressing them, either physically and informationally such creating catalog card records; aggregates result from the effort of developing single resources representing groups of information entities on the basis of shared data such as creating a list of artifacts accessioned in the same year. Information representation makes it easy for users of museum resources to find, search, sort , or manipulate those resources, considering that the bulk of information resources typically available at a museum (Svenonius, 2000).
For many years, museum professionals have made use of a wide range of tools in organizing and providing access to their museum’s information representations. These tools include ledgers, computer databases, catalogs, and digital collections management systems (Svenonius, 2000). In light of the increasing amount of information available at museums, suitable information organization makes it relatively easier for users of museum resources to undertake their research, especially where they need to find objects in storage. Similarly, precise information organization enables museum professionals to offer assistance to the users considering the time-consuming process of enabling access to artifacts.
The varied forms of information resources in a museum progress following a steady scale – beginning with basic facts regarding indivivual artifacts (what they are, where there came from, their size, what are made of, etc) to more interpretive or narrative data about the collections (their significance, why the museum collected them, their meaning, etc). Therefore in organizing their information, museums are striving to not only accurately describe what they have in their collections, but also offering supporting analyses together with active scholarship in the long term (Lord, 2007). As I figure, the greatest challenge to this relates to the problems faced by most museums of maintaining inventories of their collections, as many museums are time bound and end up focusing only on identifying their collections at the expense of interpreting or analyzing the significance of the collections themselves. I regard this a problem because such interpretive data are equally as valuable to students, scholars and researchers. Most museum visitors, particularly students and children, are often interested in learning about a given artifact in general, with a few selected artifacts chosen as prime examples (Craven, 2008).
As espoused earlier, the main mission of museums is information management. Museums therefore strive to demonstrate their comprehension of their collections to researchers, scholars, students, experts, lay people, adults and children. The museums strive to convey their knowledge in various way, to varied depths and at varied levels of complexity (Lord, 2007). Museums strive to preserve their collections and knowledge, not only over time, but also from a single product or process to the next. The recorded information thus have to meet the needs of each of the museum’s activities that require to use it, necessitating it to be encoded in such a manner that would render it efficiently appropriate to the functions for which it would be used.
Museums have not been left behind in taking advantage of technological tools in organizing their information. Museums are enabling visitors to participate in some limited “free choice learning” space by browsing a bulk of organized displays. In fact, it is gladdening to see that most exhibitions at museums are already organized to enable visitor to explore the material at their own speed and in their own fashion (Svenonius, 2000). By avoiding random placement of collections and following some organization structure, museums today have become a comfortable place for the novice user. Museums are generally making use of the “light arrangement” – which is a framework that generally resembles the museum’s own objects storage strategy i.e. by topic, by artist, by culture, or by culture (Craven, 2008). Of course, it would be more interesting if museums now considered enriching these exhibitions even more by adding an overlay of significant and diverse information.
It can also not escape mention in this paper the fact that most museums are still characterized by short labels for objects available, described using highly refine and usually technical words. There is no accompanying easy-to-comprehend omnibus system that provides both information relating to the collections and cross-disciplinary references (Craven, 2008). It is high time museums adopted user-friendly searching-aid systems for their information about their collections. It would also be beneficial for individual museums to consider integrating their proprietary information with related information drawn from other multiple sources for the benefit of the public (Lord, 2007). Making the best of technological advancements in organizing museum information also promises to revolutionize the museum experience of the user through availability of linked, unanticipated, and stream-consciousness information linked to the physical collections and rendered readily available through, say, an electronic search engine. It is everyone’s interest to have museum collections and related information to be accessible in ways similar to browsing in library stacks.
References:
Blackaby, J. & Sandore, B. (1997). Building Integrated Museum Information Systems: Practical Approaches to Data Organization and Access. Journal Article. Available at: http://www.library.illinois.edu/dcc/publications/papers/mweb215.html
Marty, F. P., & Jones, B. K. (2012). Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums. London: Routledge.
Lord, B. (2007). The manual of museum learning. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Craven, L. (2008). What are archives?: Cultural and theoretical perspectives : a reader. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
Svenonius, E. (2000). The intellectual foundation of information organization. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Alexander, E. P., Alexander, M., & American Association for State and Local History. (2008). Museums in motion: An introduction to the history and functions of museums. Lanham: AltaMira Press.
