Abstract
Many within the information field have declared that libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) must collaborate or else face extinction. The convergence of these institutions marks the extreme of this movement, which is currently being driven by technological initiatives that seek to attract new, digitally engaged users. This paper presents some recent initiatives to bring these institutions together and explores the history of exchange between LAMs. Finally, a more pointed examination of archives in museums provides grounds to question the ability of technology to facilitate deep-rooted collaboration. This reading of the history of LAMs and their current challenges raises a concern that convergence is nothing more than a rebranding exercise, in which archives appear vulnerable to lose their defining characteristics.
With the ubiquity of the Internet, the public has come to expect all information to be immediately accessible, available and useable. Digital access to information has similarly reduced user tolerance for the boundaries that have traditionally defined libraries, archives and museums (LAMs). As prominent American librarian and educator Robert Martin noted in 2007, users who access the content of LAMs in the digital environment do not care where the original material is located.Footnote 1 Given this indifference, it appears that the historical distinctions between libraries, archives and museums mean nothing to their new, digitally engaged users, and it is this attitude that seems to be the driving force behind the current theoretical and practical attention to the convergence of the three institutions.Footnote 2
There is, however, more to these recent efforts than simply meeting the expectations of the public; convergence cannot be reduced (or accomplished, for that matter) so easily. As Ken Soehner – Chief Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – once described, real collaboration requires a leap of faith and necessitates ‘a transformational change that is akin to letting go of one trapeze in midair before a new one swings into view’.Footnote 3 This leap moves LAMs well beyond comparatively simple interactions of coordination and cooperation and into a realm where convergence breaks down the divides between disciplines.Footnote 4 Following a summary of current proposals in favour of a shared technological future for LAMs, supported by two examples of ongoing initiatives in Australia and Germany, this paper explores the co-dependent history of these institutions through published articles, opinion pieces, reference works and other texts. It takes a critical look at established points of intersection, with a particular focus on archives that exist within museums. Then, by reading current theory and literature against the grain of these histories and realities, the perceived benefits of convergence are problematised.
Ultimately, questions are raised concerning the ability of technology to facilitate collaboration between LAMs and the value of convergence itself within the archival profession, both domestically and internationally. These questions aim to shape the discourse around the future of archives within the larger information field and the relationships that archives maintain with their library and museum counterparts. The scope of this paper is limited to an analysis and critique of theory, literature and practice and intentionally excludes an attempt to provide comprehensive and final conclusions about all of the convergence projects that are currently underway. However, the discussion herein will support the next logical stage of the project, which requires in-depth field research and the accumulation of hard data to provide additional weight to any conclusions reached.
Many current information and recordkeeping professionals pin the future of collaboration – and, by extension, convergence – among LAMs on the development of compatible digital technologies and the creation of integrated access systems to collections. In her article ‘New Partnerships for Old Sibling Rivals: The Development of Integrated Access Systems for the Holdings of Archives, Libraries, and Museums’, Katherine Timms argues that unified points of digital access will provide all three institutions with an opportunity to better serve their users, while also allowing the institutions themselves to remain distinct entities and retain their unique traditions.Footnote 5 ‘[T]he digital realm’, she claims, ‘can act as a meeting point where digital collections from all three types of institutions can intersect and coexist’.Footnote 6 This new environment provides a place for LAMs to interact ‘and take on a new persona with the sole purpose of providing access to cultural heritage online’, while not compromising the integrity of the physical institutions or their distinct content.Footnote 7
Timms proposes that federated searching – a tool by which multiple databases are simultaneously searched via a single interface or portal – can serve to unify collections and provide simplified access for digital users.Footnote 8 The advantage to this approach is that institutions can continue with their approaches to methods of description and cataloguing, while the search tool accommodates different methods of documentation, compiles search results and presents them to the user in a unified format. Though the unseen process of content management remains distinct and appropriate to the parent organisations, boundaries disintegrate through the portal interface and effectively disappear for the user. The benefits of collaboration in the digital environment and convergence among LAMs in general, Timms claims, are not confined to users; advantages also include financial efficiency and strengthened political advocacy to achieve common goals.Footnote 9
Thomas Kirchhoff, Werner Schweibenz and Jorn Sieglerschmidt present similar justifications for the implementation of Bibliotheken Archiven Museen (BAM) – a joint portal of libraries, archives and museums in Germany. Like Timms and Martin, they argue that ‘[i]n the digital realm, it is no longer relevant whether the original materials are in a library or a museum or an archive. This trend sets the stage for a new institution of digital heritage, the so called “memory institutions”’.Footnote 10 These institutions seek to capitalise on the digitisation efforts already made and to establish connections between the existing digital collections of individual institutions. Through collaboration in the digital environment, Kirchhoff et al. suggest that memory institutions ‘could serve as the bridges connecting the digitization islands in the vast sea of the Internet’.Footnote 11
To this end, BAM serves as a single point of access for LAMs, with the intention of establishing itself as the digital portal to Germany’s cultural content.Footnote 12 Rather than relying on federated searching of collections, which can often be slow and cumbersome, BAM harvests and stores metadata from the collections of various institutions on its server. Search programs use this data to analyse information quickly and provide a gateway back to the original collection. This new memory institution, Kirchhoff et al. contend, is not in competition with the existing library, archive and museum entities, but, rather, serves to increase their public visibility.Footnote 13 To this end, BAM actively works to encourage the routing of Internet traffic through its own portal – and, thus, back to the collections of participating institutions – by broadly publishing web links in partnership with Wikipedia Germany, through which BAM is able to access a large information-seeking audience.Footnote 14
Similar initiatives have been underway in Australia for well over a decade, beginning with the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) release of Picture Australia in 1999. This service was made possible by a combination of ongoing digitisation projects being carried out by various institutions across the country and metadata aggregation being conducted by the NLA.Footnote 15 The latter was already an established activity of the National Library since 1981, when it established the Australian Bibliographic Network in an effort to link library collections throughout Australia.Footnote 16 By 2001, Picture Australia had coordinated the presentation of content from a single museum, a single gallery, a single archive, a single government agency and six libraries.Footnote 17 In 2009, though, the project boasted 1.7 million images from over 100 separate collections, including LAMs and other popular digital repositories.Footnote 18 Over those years, the NLA was also in the process of developing an additional seven ‘national discovery’ services that covered everything from music to dance and web archiving to the output of Australian universities and research institutions.Footnote 19
Ultimately, these services provided significant information depth and access to a large variety of content across Australia, but multiple access points proved cumbersome for users and the numerous hosting platforms were difficult for the NLA to maintain.Footnote 20 In response, the National Library amalgamated the services into a ‘Single Business Discovery Project’ in 2009, since titled Trove, seeking to provide ‘improved service for users (less aggregations to search) and more scope for the library to maintain and innovate (by not having to manage many silo applications)’.Footnote 21 Similar to the original operation of Picture Australia and BAM, Trove regularly harvests metadata from institutions across the country and stores this information on its servers. User search queries return results from this collected data, which link back to content in the original collections. In practice, by searching for images of a Tasmanian devil, users are provided with, among others, a recent photograph taken by an American tourist and a black and white historic image. By clicking on the thumbnail of the former, the user is redirected to a social media and photography sharing website that holds the original, full-size image; by selecting the latter, the user is redirected to the website of the National Archives of Australia. Future plans for Trove include expanding its coverage and placing a greater emphasis on ‘exposing content held by archives and museums’.Footnote 22 As with BAM, the intended effect is to promote the varied content of LAMs, while providing a unified access point that meets the expectations of the NLA’s Internet-based users.
Yet, defining a future in which the end-goal is to obliterate the perceived differences of libraries, archives and museums seems to assume that these institutions have always been defined distinctively. History shows that this is not the case. Lisa Given and Lianne McTavish argue that current trends toward convergence are derived from a common history; they provide an expansive and sweeping account of the shared pasts of libraries and museums, particularly in Canada:
From the shared goals of information organizations in the nineteenth century through today’s digital environment – where Web 2.0 and other technologies are reshaping users’ experiences of cultural organizations – we consider how the current state of [libraries, archives and museums] constitutes points of reconvergence rather than an exclusively new phenomenon.Footnote 23
In New Brunswick and Manitoba, Canada, as elsewhere in the world, they note that natural history museums originally opened in the nineteenth century with integrated archival and library mandates.Footnote 24 According to Given and McTavish, distinctions between the institutions did not really appear until professionalisation among librarians began to occur at the outset of the twentieth century – a process that was very much influenced in the United States and throughout the British Commonwealth by the influx of funding from the Carnegie Corporation.Footnote 25
In Australia, the turning point came with the release of the Carnegie-funded Munn-Pitt Survey of Australian Libraries in 1935. This report heavily criticised the inferior and neglected state of libraries – both public and institutional – throughout the country and recommended the professionalisation of librarians outright.Footnote 26 The Carnegie Corporation ensured that the report’s recommendations were implemented by directly supporting the formal education of prominent Australian librarians, demanding that libraries conform to strict professionalisation criteria in order to be eligible to receive grants and sponsoring advocacy groups.Footnote 27 This latter act encouraged the formation of the Library Group and, subsequently, the Australia Institute of Libraries, which was vital to the professionalisation of librarians in the country.Footnote 28 Outside of Australia, professionalisation was already spreading beyond libraries and, as early as the 1920s, Given and McTavish claim, was beginning to reshape museums into highly specialised institutions as educated curators replaced generalised caretakers.Footnote 29 By the 1970s, they note, libraries, archives and museums had become distinct institutions and each featured their own dedicated education programs.Footnote 30
Despite their argument that the merging of LAMs is not new, Given and McTavish are by no means critics of the current convergence movement; on the contrary, they are strong advocates. As long as education continues in ‘isolation’, they warn, ‘real boundaries to collections, management, and access of materials will remain’.Footnote 31 According to Given and McTavish, just as the distinctions among LAMs were defined and enforced through education, reconvergence will occur by the same means. In distinction from the current technology-based proposals for convergence, Given and McTavish assert that reconvergence will be driven by the graduates of iSchools – a recently formed approach to educating and training that combines the disciplines of library science, archival studies and museum studies into a single university faculty. This project is comprised of a consortium of 36 institutions in 11 countries, including the School of Computer and Information Science at the University of South Australia and the Melbourne School of Information at the University of Melbourne.Footnote 32 These new professional programs offer ‘a consistent theory of knowledge not based on distinctions between objects but based on their complementarity’.Footnote 33 The iSchool movement also heavily incorporates systems design and computer science into its curriculum, as is clearly evident in the program offerings from the two Australian members, which both emphasise information and technology as the core of the faculty. In fact, of the nine graduate study options provided by the University of Melbourne through the School of Information, none have a direct library or archives focus.Footnote 34 Given and McTavish question whether this technological focus of the new professional programs will properly represent the full scope of the shared interests of the institutions for which they train.Footnote 35 Though this questioning sets them apart from Timms, Kirchhoff et al. and other technologists, Given and McTavish are clear that LAMs must seek to collaborate or else face extinction.Footnote 36
As with any history, the trajectories of libraries, archives and museums over time are not linear. LAMs have come from a shared past and are exploring a shared future, despite the reality that their paths diverged for a time. There are examples worth considering, though, that did not follow this pattern and seem to have ignored the distinctions of the past: one current example is archives located in museums. This unique subset of collaboration emerged at the height of institutional entrenchment in the late 1970s and seems to have ignored the larger discourse surrounding discipline divisions and convergence, thus serving as a starting point for a critical examination of the recent trend.
In her article ‘New technologies and the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums’, Deborah Wythe – an archivist at the Brooklyn Museum – explores the close relationship and shared techniques of libraries and archives, while questioning why museums have only just recently become connected to these other information organisations.Footnote 37 Libraries and archives, she argues, share a central core of professional skills that require a joint development and adoption of standards and a common embrace of new technology.Footnote 38 Museums – which are inherently social – do not fit this mold so readily; whereas libraries and archives seek to provide unmediated, interpretation-free access to information, museums are designed to mediate and interpret collections via curators and exhibitions.Footnote 39 Museum exhibitions are institutional rhetoric and form the voice of the institution; when museums speak, they speak through slick, influential exhibitions.Footnote 40 Putting differences aside, Wythe concludes that, as libraries and archives have the technology assets and museums have the presentation skills, they should work together to realise a common goal of ‘helping people to explore the world’.Footnote 41
Wythe also edited a volume on museum archives for the Society of American Archivists. Museum Archives: An Introduction covers all aspects of collecting, preserving and making records available and accessible in a museum context, including appraisal, arrangement, description and use. The volume serves as a manual for this set of specialised archives and promotes their function within this context.Footnote 42 However, she is generally more cautious in her endorsement of convergence in this more extensive publication and emphasises classic archival practice, warning that archives in museums face enormous pressure from their parent organisations:
An archives within a larger institution is shaped by the mission of that organization. A museum archives, while sharing basic characteristics with the other institutional archives, must work within an outline that is vastly different from, say, a university archives.Footnote 43
This pressure can manifest in any of the procedures typical to archival work, but is often most prevalent in description, where museums are emphatically item-level orientated. Wythe encourages museum archivists to resist this downward influence and reject approaches that do not ‘exploit the full power of archival description’.Footnote 44 Though the tone struck throughout the manual is decidedly neutral towards the role of archives in museums, that warnings are even present hints at the inherent tensions involved in these ongoing sites of convergence.
Convergence, however, is not without its critics. In the very same issue of RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage in which Martin and Wythe heap praise on collaboration among LAMs, Gerald Beasley lays out his concerns. As a counterpoint, Beasley states that there are significant differences between libraries and museums, suggesting a fundamental difference: ‘libraries are all about systems, whereas museums are all about programs’.Footnote 45 Though this initial distinction leaves archives on the sidelines, his judgement of libraries brings them back into the mix:
It is sheer hubris on the part of librarians to believe they organize knowledge. They do not. Archivists do that, and museum curators do that, but librarians do not. Librarians just apply various systems to preorganized knowledge and then answer questions about what they have done.Footnote 46
Whereas Wythe identified museums as the misfits among LAMs, Beasley is certain that libraries are the odd one out, by nature of what they do (or, maybe, do not do); it is clear that he is not keen to include them in the grouping.
Beasley’s suspicion, then, is that these differences between libraries, archives and museums are irreconcilable and that the current trend towards convergence may really be an act of strategic ‘rebranding’ of these institutions.Footnote 47 Archives, despite their very real importance to government recordkeeping, accountability and academic research, have a problem with public perceptions:
… those of us who have given guided tours [of archives] to visitors and friends know that archives are not what you call “eye candy.” They often look as if they have been guaranteed anonymity as part of a witness protection plan, which is a shame. For what goes on inside those boxes is often a far more riotous mix of material culture than anything a row of books or periodicals can provide. But in marketing terms archives in storage suffer from an image problem.Footnote 48
This identity problem is an issue that has been well documented in the literature on LAM convergence. Foreshadowing Beasley ten years earlier in 1997, Matthew Jones noted in an article published in the Journal of the Society of Archivists that archives have much to gain in terms of public recognition when they become associated with a museum and benefit from demonstrable increases in visits, users and researchers.Footnote 49 This reality is reinforced by ongoing convergence projects, such as the merging of the library and museum in Albury, New South Wales in 2007. In this case, the new, combined institution – called the Albury LibraryMuseum – benefited from a doubling of visits when compared to previous attendance figures from the organisations operating as separate entities.Footnote 50 Indeed, all three types of institutions stand to improve their public profiles when they join to form memory institutions; further, archives may have the most to gain in terms of perception when they are redefined as cultural organisations.
Beasley’s concerns are not unfounded, and they may yet prove to be correct. There are issues, though, that run deeper than mere marketing. The problem, simply put, is that despite the temptations of convergence and all best efforts to maintain discipline norms, the distinctions that characterise each institution – and especially archives – are potentially lost or blurred in their union. Writing on this very topic for Archives and Manuscripts, Bruce Smith identifies two groups of museum archives: first, those that collect the records produced over the course of a museum’s business, or an institutional archives; second, collecting archives, which acquire records as part of a museum’s collecting activities.Footnote 51 In Museum Archives: An Introduction, Wythe deals exclusively with the first category, paying no attention to Smith’s more challenging, second type of archives. It is in this latter group, though, that most of the procedural issues, such as matching archival description practices (which are necessarily broad) to museum standards (which are intentionally specific to each collection item), arise. While archives and museums may share common concerns around provenance, Smith notes, they differ in their methods of documentation:
In the archival world each record series is identified and described. Information is gathered and recorded about the creation and maintenance of records throughout their lifetime. The aim of the documentation is to lead the user to the information contained in the records and to document the evidence of the records creation and function.Footnote 52
Museums, in contrast, are concerned more directly with the physical attributes of records as objects, and Smith suggests that this approach tends to be forced onto archives located in museums.Footnote 53 Museum archives are left wanting for an approach that provides for adequate levels of description required for making records available to researchers, while taking into account the display needs of the host museum.Footnote 54
Further, when traditional institutional archives, such as municipal government archives, are divorced from their parent organisations and joined with museums, they are also forced to carry Smith’s second, and problematic, function of broadly collecting non-institutional records, in order to fulfill the larger mandate of the converged archives and museums. Mergers like these place the institutions involved at risk. Jones observes that when archives converge with museums in government contexts, there is a necessary change of the overseeing administration. Typically, archives are moved out from the administrative branch of the records creators they serve to the leisure or culture departments that house the museum. This shift, he claims, is to the detriment of the archives:
One of the downsides to being part of a heritage or leisure department is, to some extent the name. The term “leisure” or “heritage” suggests to decision-makers in local government that these are legitimate areas for cutbacks when compared to housing, education and social services. Archives can become typecast as a leisure pursuit rather than a vital function of local government record-keeping and an important part of historical research.Footnote 55
This warning rings especially true in the current era of austerity and the reality of decreased funding for archives around the world, including the recent cut of $1.7 million annually for the National Archival Development Program, which is part of $9.6 million of cuts to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) that occurred in 2012.Footnote 56 These challenges are echoed in Australia, where a letter issued on 30 May of the same year from Patricia Jackson – President of the Australian Society of Archivists – to Hon. John Day – the Minister for Culture and the Arts – calls attention to the lack of funding for the State Records Office of Western Australia that is placing vital historical records at risk.Footnote 57
The convergence of LAMs connects archives with larger memory institutions and culture organisations, divorcing them from their core recordkeeping mandate. The unfortunate side effect is that the importance of archives to a democratic society is not recognised, making them vulnerable to budget cuts. As Jones warned in the 1997 article cited earlier, the forces of convergence can be difficult to resist. As relevant then as it is today, Jones implored archivists to be ‘justly proud of their own specialist skills and knowledge, and not be drawn too readily into sacrificing this identity for the undoubted benefits of closer cooperation and integration’.Footnote 58
As presented here, there are a myriad of paths towards convergence among LAMs. At times, the initiative is driven from above, forced down upon the institutions by their shared funding body, such as government. Given and McTavish suggest that internal forces stemming from the newly formed education model of iSchools will drive future change. However, the weight of the current push towards convergence is being largely generated through the application of advanced technologies to meet the expectations of digitally engaged users, as seen through the ongoing initiatives of BAM and Trove. Technology-based approaches, as already noted, are cast as being uniquely capable of maintaining the distinctions of the contributing LAM institutions, while forming a unified front for access to multiple and varied collections.Footnote 59 The promise is that this approach will maintain the distinct characteristics of the participating institutions, while driving convergence among them forward.
It should be asked, then: is this an end worth pursuing? What might be at stake?
The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has developed a model to facilitate discussions and encourage collaboration among LAMs. The OCLC employs a five-stage continuum to gauge interaction between organisations, which progresses from low-risk and low-benefit interactions to high-risk initiatives with potentially great rewards.Footnote 60 The first stage of the model is mere contact between organisations, providing an opportunity for them to get to know each other, without a formal definition of goals or responsibilities. Once LAMs are introduced and engaged in dialogue, they may progress to the second stage of cooperation. At this point, agreements are made to work together informally on small activities yielding minor benefits, such as an event or simply sharing information. As cooperation successfully continues, an increased level of supervision and the assigning of roles and responsibilities become necessary, in order to ensure that projects progress smoothly, signifying the more formal stage of coordination. The fourth stage of collaboration is marked by significant levels of investment by each organisation, producing something new that neither party could have produced on its own. Convergence – the ultimate stage in the continuum of LAM integration – is defined as ‘a state in which collaboration around a specific function or idea has been so extensive, engrained and assumed that is it no longer recognised by others as a collaborative undertaking’.Footnote 61 This definition is clarified by Waibel and Erway in a subsequent publication: ‘[c]ollaboration changes behaviors, processes, and organisational structures, and leads to a fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence among partners, making this transformative change the hallmark sign by which collaboration can be known’.Footnote 62
Judged according to the OCLC continuum, current digital access projects – such as those considered above, including the now defunct Picture Australia and the ongoing Trove and BAM projects – clearly meet the model’s convergence ideal.Footnote 63 Under the surface of the unified interfaces of these new, technology-based initiatives, each institution remains intentionally distinct; beyond the collected thumbnail images and aggregated metadata of Trove, users are redirected away from the search site and back to the original sources of the material and their unique holdings. This is a defining feature of convergence, according to Zorich, Waibel and Erway: ‘[r]ather than precipitating a loss of identity, creating shared services around shared functions helps to reinforce that which is most distinctive, valued and unique about each of the benefitting libraries, archives and museums’.Footnote 64 By sharing common services, LAMs are able to focus their efforts on the tasks that each is uniquely qualified to carry out.Footnote 65 In the background, the organisations carry out their familiar roles along their traditional paths, establishing a coordinated front for the purpose of opening their digital content to Internet-based users. Unified access portals, such as Trove, are a convenient method for LAMs to meet the expectations of digital users, while not disrupting their distinct practices.
However, while convergence as such is possible to achieve through new initiatives considered purely in the electronic realm, it is a different and much greater challenge to converge physical institutions. By combining libraries, archives and museums under one roof, some facility related and administrative efficiencies may be achieved, but, for the most part, each organisation struggles to maintain the aspects that makes it unique and continues to operate in isolation from the others. Discipline-specific theory and practice limit the extent to which convergence – as a force that blends processes and blurs procedures – can occur. Given this, it is difficult for collaborative projects that involve both physical and digital aspects of LAMs to extend beyond mid-level coordination on the OCLC’s model – which is characterised by the necessity of ‘a framework … making clear who does what, when, and where’ – and, at best, they are restricted to the fourth level of collaboration and the creation of something new for all parties.Footnote 66
Analysed according to the convergence continuum used by the OCLC, unified digital access projects that are currently being undertaken under the guise of collaboration may be understood as convergence. However, from the perspective of the physical institutions, they are initiatives that attempt to work around the inherent distinctions between libraries, archives and museums, and they are actually unable to realise convergence in a true, deep sense that affects the entirety of the organisations. Despite a surge in efforts towards convergence, initiatives continue to stumble over the differences that define the institutions; digital workarounds are worthy cooperative and collaborative initiatives, but not the type of convergence that causes deep-rooted boundaries to disappear. Thus, it appears that Beasley is correct, and these digital initiatives are mere rebranding, optically repositioning the institutions to meet the expectations of the public. Further, while archives may have the most to gain from convergence as a marketing initiative, their practices and theories may be the most vulnerable in this partnership and are put at great risk when merged with libraries and museums. This vulnerability has been a reality for museum archives since the 1970s. It should be asked within the archives profession, then, whether it is sufficient to sit comfortably in the shadow of libraries and museums. Alternatively, archivists can boldly assert the essential recordkeeping functions that form the core of the discipline and distinguish archives within the information field.
Notes
1. Robert S Martin, ‘Intersecting Missions, Converging Practice’, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, vol. 8, no. 1, 2007, p. 82.
2. Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway, ‘Think Globally, Act Locally: Library, Archives, and Museum Collaboration’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 24, no. 4, December 2009, p. 324. See also, Diane Zorich, Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway, Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaborations Among Libraries, Archives and Museums, OCLC Research, Dublin, 2008, available at <http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2008/2008-05.pdf>, accessed 8 April 2011.
3. Kenneth Soehner, ‘Out of the Ring and into the Future: The Power of Collaboration’, presentation at the RLG Members Forum Libraries, Archives and Museums – Three Ring Circus, One Big Show?, St. Paul, 12 July 2005.
4. Zorich et al., p. 5.
5. Katherine Timms, ‘New Partnerships for Old Siblings: The Development of Integrated Access Systems for the Holdings of Archives, Libraries, and Museums’, Archivaria, no. 68, Fall 2009, pp. 69, 91.
6. ibid., p. 68. Emphasis added.
7. ibid., p. 71.
8. ibid., p. 82.
9. ibid., p. 69.
10. Thomas Kirchhoff, Werner Schweibenz and Jorn Sieglerschmidt, ‘Archives, Libraries, and Museums and the Spell of Ubiquitous Knowledge’, Archival Science, no. 8, 2008, p. 252.
11. ibid., p. 255.
12. ibid., p. 256.
13. ibid., p. 252.
14. ibid., p. 257.
15. Warwick Cathro and Susan Collier, ‘Developing Trove: The Policy and Technical Challenges’, National Library of Australia, February 2010, p. 2, available at <http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/view/1666/2025>, accessed 22 August 2012.
16. ibid., p. 2.
17. Warwick Cathro, ‘Smashing the Silos: Towards Convergence in Information Management and Resources’, presentation at the Information Orienteering Conference, Canberra, 5 April 2001, available at <http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/viewArticle/1316/1602>, accessed 28 August 2012.
18. Cathro and Collier, p. 2.
19. ibid., p. 2.
20. ibid., p. 3.
21. ibid., p. 3. Trove is available at <http://trove.nla.gov.au/>, accessed 28 August 2012.
22. ibid., p. 11.
23. Lisa M Given and Lianne McTavish, ‘What’s Old is New Again: The Reconvergence of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Digital Age’, The Library Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2010, p. 8.
24. ibid., pp. 10–13.
25. ibid., p. 16.
26. Larry Amey, ‘When Libraries Made Headlines’, The Australian Library Journal, vol. 50, no. 3, 2001, available at <http://alia.org.au/publishing/alj/50.3/full.text/when.libraries.html>, accessed 29 August 2012.
27. A detailed analysis of the influence of the Munn-Pitt Survey and influence of the Carnegie Corporation on academic libraries can be found in Michael J Birkner, ‘“Not Yet Ready”: Australian University Libraries and Carnegie Corporation Philanthropy, 1935–1945’, Faculty Publications, Paper 3, 2010, available at <http://cupola.gettysburg.edu/histfac/3/>, accessed 29 August 2012.
28. Amey.
29. Given and McTavish, p. 17.
30. ibid., pp. 20–1.
31. ibid., p. 23.
32. iSchools Organisations, ‘Meet the iSchools’, available at <http://www.ischools.org/site/descriptions/>, accessed 28 August 2012. See also, the website of the School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia, available at <http://www.unisa.edu.au/IT-Engineering-and-the-Environment/Computer-and-Information-Science/>, accessed 28 August 2012; and the website of the Melbourne School of Information, University of Melbourne, available at <http://www.msi.unimelb.edu.au/>, accessed 28 August 2012.
33. Given and McTavish, p. 25.
34. Melbourne School of Information, University of Melbourne, ‘Graduate Coursework Study’, available at <http://www.msi.unimelb.edu.au/study/graduate/>, accessed 28 August 2012.
35. Given and McTavish, pp. 26–7.
36. ibid., p. 27.
37. Deborah Wythe, ‘New Technologies and the Convergence of Libraries, Archives, and Museums’, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, vol. 8, no. 1, 2007, pp. 51–5.
38. ibid., p. 52.
39. ibid., pp. 53–4.
40. Bruce Ferguson, ‘Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense’, in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 183.
41. Wythe, ‘New Technologies’, p. 55.
42. Deborah Wythe (ed.), Museum Archives: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Society of American Archivists, Chicago, 2004.
43. ibid., p. 9.
44. ibid., p. 43.
45. Gerald Beasley, ‘Curatorial Crossover: Building Library, Archives, and Museum Collections’, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, vol. 8, no. 1, 2007, p. 24.
46. ibid., p. 24.
47. ibid., p. 20.
48. ibid., p. 23.
49. Matthew Jones, ‘Archives and Museums: Threat or Opportunity’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, vol. 18, no. 1, 1997, p. 32.
50. Sue Boaden and Carina Clement, ‘Beyond Co Location to Convergence: Designing and Managing New Model Library Spaces and Services to Reflect Trends in Convergence and Integration’, presentation at the IFLA Preconference Satellite, Libraries as Space and Place, Turin, 19 August 2009, p. 10, available at <http://www.ifla2009.it/online/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Final.Boaden.pdf>, accessed 28 August 2012.
51. Bruce Smith, ‘Archives in Museums’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 23, no. 1, May 1995, p. 39.
52. ibid., p. 43.
53. ibid.
54. ibid., p. 45.
55. Jones, p. 29.
56. See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Archivists Protest in Ottawa Over Federal Cuts’, 28 May 2012, available at <http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2012/05/28/archivists-protest.html>, accessed 9 July 2012.
57. Letter, Patricia Jackson to Hon. John Day, 30 May 2012, available at <http://www.archivists.org.au/icms_docs/125337_Letter_from_the_ASA_President_to_the_Minister_for_Culture_and_the_Arts_WA.pdf>, accessed 23 October 2012.
58. Jones, p. 35.
59. See Timms, p. 91; Kirchhoff et al., p. 252.
60. For a full description of the Collaboration Continuum, see Zorich et al., pp. 10–12. The model was subsequently summarised and republished in Waibel and Erway, pp. 325–6.
61. Zorich et al., p. 12.
62. Waibel and Erway, p. 334.
63. There are many other metadata harvesting initiatives operating worldwide under the guise of convergence. On a large scale, OAIster collects academically oriented digital resources from a wide variety of collections and makes 23 million records broadly available through WorldCat. See Online Computer Library Center, ‘The OAIster Database’, available at <http://www.oclc.org/oaister/>, accessed 17 September 2012. The strategy is also benefiting more targeted initiatives, such as the Sheet Music Consortium hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles, which is building an open collection of digitised sheet music, and DART-Europe E-theses Portal hosted by University College London, which provides access to European research theses through advanced searching. See Sheet Music Consortium, available at <http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/>, accessed 17 September 2012, and DART-Europe E-theses Portal, available at <http://www.dart-europe.eu/basic-search.php>, accessed 17 September 2012. Similarly, federated searching is being used by recently merged institutions to unify existing catalogues into a single search interface. LAC, for example, provides access to both its published and archival collections through an amalgamated search of the formerly distinct databases for bibliographic records and archival descriptions. See Timms, pp. 82–3; and the LAC’s search functions on its website, available at <http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.html>, accessed 17 September 2012.
64. Zorich et al., p. 12.
65. ibid.
66. Waibel and Erway, p. 326.