More second cousins – museum professionals and archivists

          Like librarians, museum professionals are closely related to archivists.  Although I’ll probably get disagreement from other archivists, I think that museum collection managers and archivists are almost closer than librarians and archivists.  Museums are in the preservation business as are archives.  Sometimes they preserve the same type of objects – maps, photographs, documents – using the same preservation techniques. Archival collections sometimes also have other objects, like paintings that could just as easily be in a museum. Both archivists and museum professionals use those objects for educational purposes – exhibits, research, scholarly publications.  Provenance (i.e. where an object came from, its history) is important for both disciplines.

            The differences are in a matter of degree.  For archivists, the information in a document is its most important attribute.  Museums generally value the object for itself. In an archive if a paper has deteriorated or will deteriorate, like newspapers, it can be photocopied or scanned so the information is preserved.  Often archives will microfilm newspapers and other information and then discard the original paper.  Microfilm has an extremely long lifespan, takes up little space, and doesn’t require particularly high tech equipment to read.  For a museum, as just noted, it would be the newspaper itself that is important.  That said it really all depends on the newspaper. If it has historic value beyond the information in it, both entities and libraries too would preserve it.

            The other difference between the two disciplines is related to the intellectual control (fancy way to say inventory) of a collection or object.  Museums catalog each item separately and assign it a unique identifier.  Collections managers and registrars are responsible for the accessioning of objects into the museum holdings. Part of the information kept about the object is its donor, creator, and information about where it came from and when, especially in the case of archaeological objects, for example.  The archivist today processes whole collections – dare I repeat – following original order.  Most recently inventory is to the box or perhaps file level only although some collections, like photographs or oral histories, might still be to the item level.  Original order is not an issue for museums as it isn’t for libraries.

            So there you have it – archivists, librarians, and museum professionals.  Some institutions have all three on staff.  What differentiates the archivist from the others is their view of provenance and original order.  What is common among all three is the emphasis on education and their use of their collections to help tell a story.