Info 202 Fall 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24naturalhistory-...

Despite having the word 'museum' in it's name, the American Museum of Natural History is no longer just a museum.  As of 2009, the Museum is also an accredited graduate university, complete with it's own massive research library. 

In class, we've discussed how the digitization of museum and library collections has caused a convergence in their collections of resources and some of the interactions that those resources support.  After all, a digital picture of the Mona Lisa on a museum's website may not be any different from the same resource found in a library's eBook and users that find either online may use them the same way.  Conversely, the resources at the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History haven't changed at all, but they are being used in new ways and for an entirely new purpose.  Rather than being collected by curators for mass viewing by the public (or private use by the staff) the museum's collection now also functions as a research library for a small group of graduate students who take classes from curators and staff scientists. 

If digitization and changes in technology have caused a convergence in resources across libraries, museums and archives, impacting their users' interactions with them, will the convergence of interactions across museums and schools impact their organizing systems and collections?  This seems to be the case; a whole new set of student interactions in a museum must have an impact on what resources are collected over time, what choices a curator makes, how the collections are stored and sorted and how they are used. 

As the dean of the Richard Gilder Graduate School points out, "Many museums already have a lot of what you need- the collections, the curators, the libraries, the tradition of research."  Not surprisingly, a handful of other museums have also entered into partnership with universities.  Furthermore, most major universities have libraries, collections, curators and the tradition of research.  Which only complicates the questions:  what is a museum, what is a library and what is a university?  And will their definitions today be the same in the future?