Role and practices in cultural heritage institutions

Museums and Libraries play the important role of collecting, preserving and facilitating access to cultural heritage knowledge. They offer a better understanding of the diverse cultures and heritage, they fulfill educational needs and promote literacy, knowledge and scientific research, contributing, this way, to a knowledge-based society.

Museums collect, preserve and exhibit mostly artifacts, works of art and other unique cultural heritage objects to the public. Their role is to document the cultural or scientific relevance of the objects they maintain in order to accumulate the contextual material that gives them meaning and implicitly justifies the reason for their preservation. The information they provide is heterogeneous since the nature of the objects collected and the data describing them can be very different, depending on the type of the collection.

 

Libraries constitute the most significant  information centers, making  all kinds of knowledge easily available to users. Their main role is to collect , organize and document information resources such as books, journals, audiovisual material etc. in order to make them accessible for reference or loan to a defined community of users. Unlike museums, libraries collect mainly non unique material since most of the objects collected concern copies of publication products.

 

 

Cultural heritage knowledge does not originate exclusively from the objects kept in the collections of museums, archives and libraries . Researchers can benefit from the wealth of information extracted from the description of the objects, known as “metadata”. It is then important for cultural heritage institutions to pay attention to these valuable information objects produced during the process of documentation and to try to preserve them, make effective use of them and provide access to them.

 

Through documentation, an object obtains its own identity. Traditional library catalogues and museum inventories are the tools that users may search in order to reach a library resource or information on a particular museum object. Catalogues and inventories can be viewed as simple lists  of records, where a record per resource is created. However in current documentation practices the metadata act  as points of accessing a library or museum object  but are disregarded as sources of information beyond that. 

Libraries are concerned mainly with the collection and documentation of books while museums collect and document mainly unique museum objects. Since the cultural information held by museums and libraries is heterogeneous, the metadata created to describe the various objects also vary from case to case.For this reason institutions follow different documentation and curatorial practices and different standards, models and meta-data schemas are used to describe their collections.

Despite the information diversity , libraries and museums may also collect same or similar objects, consequently their data may overlap.
For example libraries may document and curate rare/unique objects as museums do, such as manuscripts. On the other hand museums may  have their own library  and collect books. Also many museums produce  literature, bulletins, exhibition catalogues etc.

Other examples of common data is that the cultural objects preserved in both institutions may have been created under the same cultural context or at the same period, sometimes even by the same agents, and provide evidence of comparable cultural features. 

Books may describe the museum objects, their context and theories about and related to them. They also describe the creators, discoverers or users of the objects and they compares objects. Pictures of museum objects are also often used to illustrate those books.

Literature may also describe concepts that are exemplified or illustrated by museum objects.

Last but no least, in museum documentation, when classifying and describing a museum object, its context, its relevance with other objects etc. frequently the documentalist refers to explicit citations in literature about an object, a related person, a location etc.

Taking into account the previous examples we may conclude that cultural heritage institutions have complementary roles since the material they collect, even if it is heterogeneous, it may be very relevant, especially when conducting a specific research. For this reason, combining and providing users with an integrated view to museum and library information is a very essential step in the field of cultural documentation.

 

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