curation: museums and archives

read/viewed:

Westbrooks, Elaine L.. "African-American documentary resources on the World Wide Web: a survey and analysis." Archival Issues 24.2 (1999): 145-73.

Karp C. Digital Heritage in Digital Museums. Museum International [serial online]. May 2004;56(1/2):45-51.

Anani N. Sustainable engagement in digital heritage– The challenges of learning environments for heritage institutions. Museum International [serial online]. May 2005;57(1/2):142-143

Wechsler H, Ledbetter E. The Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal. Museum International [serial online]. December 2004;56(4):53-62.

Bowen J. The virtual museum. Museum International [serial online]. January 2000;52(1):4-7.

The Westbrooks piece (1999) is interesting in part because she lambastes DLs for not sufficiently utilizing archival principles, and archivists for their insufficient understanding of the Web environment. Because of the lack of concern for archival principles like authenticity and reliability(e.g., DLs that do not include information about the original object, or the scanning environment, or the provenance) Westbrooks argues that most of the African-American heritage DLs she analyzed are inappropriate for use at an academic or scholarly level. She says that they are useful for access--for people who could not otherwise visit the collections--for K-12 and the like.But she rates them in many cases as not worthy of the money spent in their development! While I have certainly noted the K-12 bent of many of the collections, I had not related it to a lack of metadata. I tend to think of metadata in terms of IR, but of course there is much more to it that that. I did keep thinking of Cliff Lynch's effort to separate digital librarians from curators--Westbrook seems to think that both librarians and archivists are not concerned enough with curation.

On that note I turned to the issues of Museum International that Ian Anderson had mentioned, to see what kinds of issues they were grappling with in digital collections. Karp examines the definition of "virtual museum" and how it differs from a physical museum--I am reminded of Michael Lesk talking about how the term "digital library" is doomed to go the way of "horseless carriage." Karp comes up with IP and ownership, and curation--long-term preservation and care of the digital objects. Migration, bitstream preservation etc, what I think of as archival concerns.

Anani talks about Web 2.0 features for museums, like pre- and post-visit forums, and how such features might foster the development of new groups of users. Bowen mentions the 24 Hour Museum, (now Culture24) a collection of UK museum virtual collections and other related stuff in 1 place. I wonder how it works--I bet its not autopopulating from the different Web sites (via a OAI-PMH-like interface) but that would be cool to find out. I will look around a bit. Finally, the piece about the Web portal for Nazi-era art turned out to not be particularly relevant, but it was interesting anyway. A DL with an entirely different purpose, where provenance was the most important facet of the objects.

Add to list (maybe) more Yakel:
Yakel, E., & Kim, J. (2003). Midwest State Archives on the Web: A Content and Impact Analysis. Archival Issues, 28(1), 47-62.

For sure, 1 last museum piece:

Bearman D, Trant J. Interactivity comes of age: museums and the World Wide Web. Museum International [serial online]. October 1999;51(4):20-24.