[ih] Museum archiving (was: Re: IENs)

[Craig Partridge]

Hi Dave:

You asked about museums and their commitment to archiving.  As someone who
was trained as a historian and still does occasional archival work for fun,
I'll hazard a somewhat structural answer and then John D. can comment on
computing museums.

One can assess archives on at least three dimensions:

* Commitment to ensuring their collections are preserved for centuries to
come.  This requires money (for fire suppression and temperature monitoring
and the like) and also requires careful evaluation and planning (preserving
paper for instance, is different from preserving paintings, which is
different from preserving fabrics).

* Commitment to creating finding aids (catalogs, indexes, collection
descriptions) that enable researchers to find items in the collections.

* Commitment to making their collections available for research (or public
display).

The last may surprise folks but there are a number of institutions that
have strong views about who should and should not be able to use their
collections, usually to the detriment of scholarship and the public
interest.

(And, if you want an example of exactly how not to do all three, consider
the team of scholars who were originally given control of the Dead Sea
Scrolls).

Craig

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