Keynote address presented by W. Boyd Rayward, Dean of Professional Studies, University of New South Wales, at the 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation - Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, 28-30 November 1995.
- Abstract
- Introduction
- The Functions of Libraries, Museums and Archives
- An Undifferentiated Past
- The Differentiation and Complementarity of Functions
- Problems of "Electronification"
- The Centrality of the Archival Function
- A Seamless Web and its Challenges
- References
Abstract
The thesis of this paper is that the advent of electronic sources of information and their ever increasing volume and variety are changing the roles and relationships of archives, museums and libraries. It is my view that the distinctions between these apparently different types of institutions eventually will make as little sense in the future as they did three hundred or so years ago, and indeed the distinctions are already becoming blurred. Moreover, some of the functions that have become typical of these organisations are being performed by other players in the contemporary information generation and dissemination game, such as publishers, networks, data archives, and various kinds of information brokers. Thus, new kinds of functional re-alignments between all of those involved organisationally in collecting, storing and disseminating information have begun to emerge. The key issue is the impact of new electronic technologies and the availability of information sources in electronic form on the custodial, keeping, archival role of "collecting" institutions such as museums, libraries and archives and on the ways in which they make available what they collect for use.Introduction
In this paper I want to avoid speaking of change in the imperative - or what one might better call the expostulatory - mood: you must act in this or that way or face these or those dire consequences; or if you do not do this and that immediately, then something dreadful to be deeply regretted will occur. The pundits who speak in this way often have special interests, perhaps commercial or related to professional politics of some kind, that they are pushing. They ride the crests of the waves of change and believe they know where the waves will break. I lack their conviction. My aim is only to speak about some ideas I have about what I think may be occurring and about what I take to be interesting historical resonances.
I raise questions about the emerging information order. None of them is new, but I find them intriguing and perplexing. My aim is to provide a framework or perspective for some of the changes, some of the inescapable dilemmas that we must confront actively and purposefully or by default. My paper reflects an idiosyncratic approach to historical explanation but a strong belief that history has always something to bring to our understanding, even, perhaps especially, when we are dealing with something that is new.
I start form the point of view that all societies have their own distinctive ways of managing information as a condition of their organisation, reproduction and control. They are characterised by an information infrastructure along with other kinds of infrastructure by means of which social stability, cohesiveness and continuity are assured. Managing information is concerned with certain aspects of informing and becoming informed (Buckland, 1991), of finding out, knowing, understanding, deciding, and remembering both at the specific level of the individual and at the more general, metaphoric level of society, government, and the organisation. What constitutes information, the forms it takes, what it may be called, how it is represented, communicated and used, changes from one historical context to the next, from generation to generation, from one way of thinking about the world to another.
Libraries, museums and archives in our society have emerged over the centuries as important organisational components of what I have called society's information infrastructure. Their roles and functions, as these have developed over this period, are the expression of a variety of cultural and social practices related to education, research, artistic creativity, entertainment and recreation. Until recently the distinctive differences between libraries, museums and archives have rested in part on the formats of the typical artefacts that have been accepted as their special province. Specialised techniques have been required to manage these different formats. These techniques have created organisationally prescribed ways of using the artefacts by the various clienteles permitted access to them.
The Functions of Libraries, Museums and Archives
Libraries and librarianship have been centred on the acquisition, in the main, of printed books and journals, or recently developed surrogates of them such as microfilm, and on managing access to the resulting collections by means of special techniques for cataloguing, classification and physical arrangement. In addition, extensive and often complicated systems of bibliographic control, backed up by interlibrary lending procedures, have been devised to provide "intellectual" and physical access to what has not been acquired. "Information" or reference services of different kinds and levels of sophistication have been set up in the different kinds of library for their special clienteles.
Modern librarianship has tended to stress the importance of the library as an information access mechanism because of the extraordinary growth that has occurred in the volume, complexity and cost of the information sources which fall within the purview of libraries but which no one library, no matter how great a research collection it aspires to acquire, can now hope to obtain. Though librarians talk of information storage and retrieval as their raison d'être, they usually do not tell an enquirer what he or she might want to know. Their systems are intended to allow the provision of texts or locations for texts that might be useful in particular cases. They perform their professional functions by identifying and retrieving whole or parts of recorded texts that are held in their own collections or in the collections of other libraries to which they have access. The texts are printed and written collections of manuscripts and personal papers, for example. They may also be images derived from collections of documentary photographs, maps, prints or pictures.
Libraries often have archival and museum-like functions. We often forget this. The research library in particular has a special archival function. It preserves texts permanently against possible future uses. The size and comprehensiveness of its collections set it apart from other kinds of libraries and provide the basic criteria for its distinctive usefulness. Such libraries are literally documentary or print archives. Moreover, some of the printed or written artefacts that many libraries, especially research libraries, contain have the kind of artefactual value that typically attaches to museum objects. This is especially true of the materials in rare book rooms or which are held in special collections. Collections of photographs, print, pictures and drawings that some research libraries hold are usually not permanently exhibited, as they might be in a gallery or museum, but form part of the stored collections of the library and are retrieved and consulted in the same way as other texts. However, an important expression of the museum-like values that attach to these library materials is the special exhibitions that are mounted for them.
The objects collected by museums theoretically have no limit. There are natural history, science and technology, and ethnographic museums. There are museums of musical instruments, costumes, furniture and household equipment, maritime and railway museums. Aquaria and botanical gardens are "living" museums; national and regional art galleries are museums. Museums are identified by their commitment to the collection, storage and educative display of physical, three dimensional, objects which are in some way representative of the classes of objects, the genera and species, to which they belong. This is true of the artist's creative work, each item usually unique, that galleries collect and display. The organisation of the objects for display and the milieu contrived for display are intended to be informative.
The major use to which the museum puts the objects in its collection is exhibition. They are typically "viewed" but not in isolation for each object is usually located (i.e. stored or exhibited) within in a specially devised social, scientific, or historical context of commentary and related items. In terms of the items in their permanent collections, whether kept in storage or on permanent display, museums preserve objects for the future as evidence of the past or present. Some art galleries honour this generalisation in the breach when it come to installation or performance art. Photographic or video records of these "exhibitions" then have to be stored as library-like items or are used in subsequent exhibitions as surrogates for the "original" work.
Many museums have an important research function carried out, depending on the kind of museum, by a permanent specialist staff ethnographers, palaeontologists, archaeologists, art historians and so on whose expertise is deployed in identifying, acquiring, cataloguing, and exhibiting the objects that fall within the museum's ambit. The sometimes quite lengthy explanatory annotations, often reflecting an assessment of what is appropriate for a particular audience of "viewers" (the general public, for example, as opposed to a special scholarly audience), that are prepared for displayed items and for published catalogues are often of considerable scholarly importance.
Traditionally, archives collect the records that government and other organisations create as part of their day to day operation. Special techniques have been required to appraise what is often the vast bulk of these records in which individual items are of relatively little pre-determinable value although, subsequently, identification of such items may well be crucial for the research of a particular investigator to decide what will be retained and for how long. Bearman suggests that "when we accession, transfer, arrange, weed, document and inventory archival materials we change their character as well as enhance their evidential and informational value. The fact of processing, exhibiting, citing, publishing and otherwise managing records becomes a significant fact in their meaning as records, which is not true of library materials" (Bearman, 1992, p.10). Museum objects are obviously subject to the same series of procedures and so, similarly, acquire attributed meaning and enhanced evidential and informational value. One might also suggest, despite what Bearman says, that a similar argument holds for library materials.
The anchor of modern archival science is the principle of provenance or "respect des fonds," the identification of the agency creating the records essentially in terms of its institutional relationships and the maintenance of the integrity of the body of records as originally created (Gavrel, 1990). This is not dissimilar to the extension that librarians have had to make to what once seemed the relatively simple idea of the author of a book or article. As the notion of authorship has increasingly become blurred and amorphous, it has been replaced by the idea of "primary responsibility" for a "work." Because of the nature of the activities of government and other organisations, archives often contain much library-like material as well as many museum-like objects maps, printed documents, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, architectural models and so on. Unlike libraries and museums, these items are acquired as part of the records that document a particular activity, function or responsibility of the creating body.
An Undifferentiated Past
My argument is that modern libraries, museums and archives are different mainly because of the nature of the materials for which they have primary responsibility and because of the ways in which they provide for the educative and research uses of these materials. The emergence of their specialised functions can be traced in modern times from the previously relatively undifferentiated collections of books and objects that exercised the acquisitive energies of princes, aristocrats, gentlemen and scholars from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century. In England Bacon set the program to be followed:
First, the collecting of a most perfect and general library, wherein whosoever the wit of man hath heretofore committed to books of worth... may be made contributory to your wisdom. Next, a spacious, wonderful garden, wherein whatsoever plant the sun of divers climate, or the earth out of divers moulds, either wild or by the culture of man brought forth, may be...set and cherished; this garden to be built about with rooms to stable rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds; with two lakes adjoining, the one with fresh water the other salt, for a variety of fishes. And so you may have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private. The third, a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, the shuffle of things has produced; whatsoever nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included. the forth such a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher's stone (Bacon, Gesta Grayorum, 1594, cited in Impey and MacGregor, p.1).
The cabinets of curiosities, so much a feature of the wealthy and upper class households of the period reflected not only an interest in what was rare, valuable and out of the ordinary but, as Hudson has pointed out, also an acute, eager interest in the natural world and the created world of the artist (Hudson, 1988). There was little of the division between the sciences and humanistic disciplines so widespread today. All learning and art was seen as having a fundamental unity, ultimately deriving from religion. What was important was the acquisition of whatever artefacts text or objects that were appropriate to the broad, what we would call the multi-disciplinary intellectual interests of the individuals collector. These interests and the purposes and social and intellectual functions of the Cabinets changed as the vestiges of medieval and renaissance world views were challenged and finally swept away by the new ways of thinking about the world that mark the Enlightenment (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; Yates, ).
Thus, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, reflecting John Tradescant's Closet of Curiosities in which it had originated, consisted among other things of collections related to natural history and antiquities, a library, and a chemical laboratory (Hudson, 1988, p. 21). John Evelyn described Sir Thomas Browne's house and garden as a "paradise and Cabinet of Rarities, and the best collection, especially Medails, books, Plants [and] natural things," though he was most taken with Browne's collection of birds eggs (MacGregor, 1988, p. 156). Later in the eighteenth century, Sir Hans Sloane's great collection "contained specimens of plants, animals, birds, fossils, minerals, as well as antiquities, works of art, coins, books and ethnographical materials" (Hudson, 1975, p. 18). It is only today that the final separation of the library from other parts of the British Museum created by Act of Parliament in 1753, for which Sloane's collection was a principal base, is occurring, though the natural history collections were removed to South Kensington in 1857. It should also be noted that the other foundation collections for the Museum were the extensive manuscript collections of Sir Robert Cotton and the Earl of Oxford, Robert Harley, which contained large and important collections of State papers and other archives, along with the library of George III which came to the Museum in 1827 (Miller, 1974).
An interesting expression of the early complementary relationship of library and museum was the initiative taken by the Charleston Library Society. Set up in South Carolina in 1748, its collections contained scientific instruments as well as books and it lent both to its members. In 1773 it initiated an appeal for natural history specimens and in a few years it had amassed "an extensive collection of Beasts, Birds, Reptiles, Fishes, Warlike Arms, Dresses and other Curiosities." This became the nucleus of the collections of what was described in the mid Nineteenth Century as "one of the best museums in the United States (Hudson, 1975, p. 32-33)."
The Differentiation and Complementarity of Functions
But highly elaborated functional differentiation that created different kinds of organisation was inevitable because of what was required to manage collections that were growing in size, complexity and specialisation and because of the need to make the collections responsive to the needs and interests of an ever-enlarging body of prospective users. As a result libraries, museums and archives developed distinct identities as systems of different specialised functions, formalised in different sets of institutional practices whose integrity has been maintained by separate professional cadres of personnel operating from and through different configurations of space. This differentiating process reached its high point in the 1950s and 1960s before the advent of the computer" revolution." But something was lost in these immense gains of organisational sophistication. What has developed does not reflect the needs of an individual scholar or member of the educated public interested in some aspect of learning or life. For the individual the ideal is still the personal cabinet of curiosities that contains whatever is needed for a particular purpose or to respond to a particular interest, irrespective of the nature of the artefacts involved -- books, objects, data, personal papers, recorded image, government files.
The functional complementarity of libraries, museums and archives has been implicit in speculations over the recent centuries about how to mobilise the growing knowledge that is potentially available in the service of society if only a firm grip could be taken on it. Bacon's House of Solomon, Leibniz's Encyclopedia, Otlet's Office of Documentation and Palais Mondial, Wells's World Brain all imply distress at, or explicitly lament, the institutional specialisations that have emerged as a result of the ever-escalating growth of knowledge - and the complexity that they both express and create. Each of these utopian schemes represents a special suggestion for a single institutional framework within which the world of learning might be encompassed and better managed (Rayward, 1994a). It is possible to see the "electronification" of records and the access possible through the Internet to images and sound as well as textual material as bringing us a step closer towards realising the ideal of integrated, universal access to all knowledge that underlies these schemes and the social and intellectual aspirations to which they give expression. They are simply echoes of that desire "for an all-embracing documentation of the world and of human activities" (Bstrom, 1985, p. 95 ) that lay behind the creation of the various kinds of Cabinets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Problems of "Electronification"
Increasingly "information-as thing" (Buckland, 1991), as text, image, object, datum, specimen, record group or file, is represented or representable electronically or indeed may only be available in that form. In so far as these electronic representations are adequate for a particular purpose, the physical distinctions between the different formats or media of record disappear. That is to say digitisation destroys difference; it eliminates physical distinctions between types of records and thus, presumably, the need for organisational distinctions in the management of the systems within which these records are handled.
Modern telecommunications systems now make it of little concern to the individual researcher where the record he or she wishes to access is held - library, archive, museum, commercial database vendor, or any personal or institutional location on the Internet provided only that what is wanted is available electronically and at some affordable cost. In effect he or she can at will create ever-changing virtual "cabinets of curiosities" in which any kind of digitised document text, image or object can be introduced and used. The kind of almost science fiction-like speculations of Paul Otlet in the 1930s as he tried to imagine a new information technology embracing radio, X-rays, film, sound recordings, microphotography and television which had only recently become available, are now realisable practically (Otlet, 1991; Rayward, 1994b).
Nevertheless, the critical question remains: what is to be collected, by whom, and under what circumstances of preservation, availability and access. This is not a new question. Modern libraries, archives and museums represent historically-determined, institutionalised answers to it. Now, however, answers to such a question are no longer certain. In so far as the media of the past continue to be centrally involved there is little problem - books mainly for libraries, objects mainly for museums, and government and organisational records mainly for archives. But the electronic versions of these media create problems about who has responsibility for identifying and collecting them, preserving them physically, and maintaining systems of access to them. Other electronic information sources present even more pressing problems of this kind because there is no real precedent for dealing with them.
Library Functions
New kinds of high volume scanning techniques and new kinds of cheap, high density storage media emerge, are making it possible to create electronic collections or "libraries" or "archives." The preservation and space problems that bedevil libraries attempting to manage huge paper collections may well then be obviated by these developments. "Electronic libraries"are potentially more comprehensive and much easier to use than the microfilm collections that preceded them. The "electronic library" might contain runs of journals or large bodies of special materials such as the texts in the Short Title Catalogues, or reproductions of major collections in a particular museum or gallery, or a data base assembled from materials held in different locations of the entire oeuvre for a particular artist or schools of artists, or the correspondence of a particular author, or Colonial Office Papers between certain dates. Such electronic sources may well replace microfilm as the way to build up research collections. They will become increasingly easy to create; they are readily duplicated and are certainly saleable. They are, however, simply embraced within the library's traditional collection development and preservation functions, though raising issues about the availability and updating of the technology on which they depend.
As the publication of what were formerly printed materials books and journals particularly increasingly takes an electronic dimension, publishers and the brokers of online database services are exploring new ways of packaging and making this material directly available to users. The new bibliographic and document supply services, however configured and labelled, are performing important "library" functions, clearly recognisable though not usually acknowledged as such. A question they pose is the extent to which their services are essentially based on what is currently available in electronic format and commercially practicable to supply. The complement to this question is the extent to which older, out of date, less used parts of these electronic files will be effectively and permanently "archived."
This issue has hardly become a problem yet because most of the files now being dealt with cover a relatively short period of time. Nor are there yet substantial numbers of them compared with what continues to be made available in print format. But in two or five or ten or fifty years it is likely that the situation will change. We can assume that the files will continue to increase rapidly in size, that patterns of use that emphasise what is current will not change, and that the rate of technological development with all of its implications for system migration and file remastering, will not diminish even if it does not continue to accelerate. Under these circumstances, the commercial organisations responsible at the moment for these services, are unlikely to want to preserve the files permanently in a single database or even a set of related databases. Presumably the responsibility for their preservation and the provision of access to them as an archive will at some point be given over to what have hitherto been called libraries or data archives.
It may well be that what we now call libraries will enter the life cycle of formally published material of this kind, the knowledge food chain, if you will, at a later point than in the past. Less concerned with current availability, they will become essentially archives of databases that no longer have current commercial viability. Critical in this process as in the case of all electronic archiving is the extent to which the files will have to be "remastered" or converted to meet changing technological standards.
Museum Functions
Museum collections have been undergoing the similar processes of digital representation and transformation. In some cases, the traditional "viewing" function that they have performed has been amplified by new kinds of information systems. In these systems electronic representation of objects allows for manipulation, a more intimate, detailed, muitidimensional inspection than is possible conventionally. They can also incorporate a much greater variety of contextual material and depth or analytic comment for the objects involved. Multi media or hypermedia applications from museum tours to recreations of eighteenth century Montreal to the exploration of Piero della Francesca's fresco "Legend of the True Cross" (Trant, 1993; Bearman, 1991) pose special problems of storage and access beyond the occasion of initial development and use as working databases. They have an archival function in documenting an important activity of the museum. Many of these museum "exercises" also represent a special approach to expressing the state of knowledge with respect to particular item or subject of "investigation." Thus the preservation of the systems will be important in documenting the disciplinary developments in art history, say, or archaeology as well as the work of the museum involved.
Archive Functions
The development of the electronic office with its enormous range of software and hardware has dramatically affected the work of archivists. It epitomises some of the major problems that are created by electronic information sources that originate in new processes of communication based on telecommunications and electronic networks.
Sophisticated systems provide access to a variety of software and hardware, as well as gateways to exterior information systems. In most cases, these systems do not have record management capabilities and documents can be destroyed voluntarily or involuntarily by the creators at any point in time. Naming conventions for documents are not standardised within the organisation and the choice of document names is left to creators... The knowledge of file classification systems within the organisation is limited and documents are often given acronyms which may have meaning at the time of the creation of the document but usually not several weeks later and certainly have no meaning to others in the organisation. Most creators manage their documents within their own personal filing systems without reference to any corporate system or link to existing hard copy records within the organisation (Gavrel, 1990, p. 18).
Gavrel points out that many of the sources of information "do not reside inside the organisation but are accessed by communication links or gateways outside the organisation" (P 19). Not only, then, do the records have to be appraised and account taken of the particular problems of inter organisational databases,
It may also be necessary, to ensure that the archival record is complete, to preserve certain software and access records of the system. If certain records only existed for seconds on the screen, it may be important to select, along with the records, the access logs to the system which identify by whom and when the system was accessed. The value of these logs will not be in the records themselves but in providing proof that certain systems were accessed at a particular time and by whom. In a similar vein, it will become important to retain certain software, particularly if decision-making processes are a fundamental part of the software (Gavrel, 1990, p. 22)
It can be expected that archival records in electronic form make possible the use of indexing techniques that have been developed for more general applications. The principle of provenance or "respect des fonds" is essentially inadequate for all but the few users of archives who are interested in the nature of the organisation that the record arrangements reflect. Most users are interested in general problems or topics on which they are seeking information. If documents are captured electronically, it should be possible for provenance to be instantly recreated or changed to reflect shifting organisational alignments of functions and offices if this is required. The records themselves can be copied and manipulated in any way that available software allows but, equally, their original order should be automatically regeneratable. They can be searched for personal, corporate or geographic names and by subjects either in full text mode or on text surrogates to the degree that these have been provided. Effectively the archive and the library from this point of view become identical as bodies of electronic text, though record volume in the archive, its "legal, fiscal and operational need for evidence" (Bearman, 1992), and the complexity and variability of record structures may remain a problem for the design of the data content of archival documentation and for information retrieval techniques.
The Centrality of the Archival Function
New Digital Information Resources
Continuous editions: the new forms of electronic "information-as-thing" that have now to be brought within the set of functions that libraries and museums entail, present a number of problems. Electronic journals, hypertext systems, other kinds of expert systems used for design and modelling purposes in architecture, engineering, city planning, astronomy for example, or interactive medical differential diagnosis systems, represent the status of specialist knowledge at a given time. Apart from current use, they have important archival value in documenting the development and history of the aspects of science and scholarship to which they relate. If they are routinely updated as new information comes to hand or if they go through various stages of development so that they are always "current," unless "copies" of earlier versions "editions?" are kept and "archived" there is no record of these developments.
Hypertext systems : An interesting expression of this problem of textual malleability is Davenport and Cronin analysis of hypertext. They observe, somewhat hyperbolically, that hypertext "functions as an elastic palimpsest allowing access to and reworking of layered texts." "Hypertext may transform the practice and culture of science by opening up texts for comment and verification in ways which previously have been impossible "(Davenport and Cronin 1990). As texts shift and change and merge not only are general questions raised about authorial responsibility and document integrity and authority, practical issues of what part of the text will be kept and how changes in it will be monitored and recorded become pressing. Perhaps this is an area to which archival appraisal techniques, which focus centrally on the evidential value and uses of records, may well be brought to bear.
The systems mentioned above have a special importance as a form of organisational archives. They document aspects of institutional functioning. Here there are two kinds of problems. the first is to keep some manifestation of the system as an archival record. But what is to be kept if the system goes through continuous or major changes? All of them present, as all electronic files present, major problems of the physical preservation of whatever format they are currently in and of ensuring that they do not become victims of technological obsolescence as software and hardware change. How, as time goes by is knowledge of system access and use protocols to be preserved.
List servers and electronic notice boards: Equally appropriate for the application of archival techniques is the ever changing listservers and electronic noticeboards available through the Internet. Who is to assume responsibility for the appraisal of these "record groups" and the development of a permanent archive from them? This is a conundrum given the near universality and the informality of access that is possible to them. Are there to be special libraries or computer-based archives into which these "records" will go. How are they to be monitored, weeded, sampled, acquired, processed and stored? Is it sufficient to leave this to chance in the same way that in the past libraries have left the collection of ephemeral materials that document social movements or other phenomena to others, relying not on their own collecting mechanisms for continuous contemporary coverage but on later bequests and donations? Is someone somewhere cumulating a file of special interest on one or more of the issues now being explored nationally and internationally through these Internet functions? In what form might this file come to a library? What will happen to the "archival" file that is kept by the originator or guardian of a particular list serv?
Personal archives, electronic mail and the "cabinet": A related question arises about casually created files that might be of later value, what might be called a personal archive. In the past, often preserved accidentally, this took the form of drafts, sketches, notebooks, files of correspondence, involving the creation of paper records. Libraries, museums and archives have been eager to collect these "personal papers," when relevant, as a complement to other aspects of their collections. These personal records are now increasingly kept electronically on hard disks or down loaded on floppy disks. Particularly important is correspondence through electronic mail which has created a record of frequently regular, sometimes almost daily interactions between groups of individuals who share common professional or personal interests. The informal electronic mail networks that have become so vital a part of the academic life approximate nothing so much as the correspondence networks that were so important a feature of the Republic of Letters of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a "virtual" institution effectively displaced by the growth of our modern pattern of scientific communication involving journals, newsletters and the like. The messages in the e-mail system will be as important for historians in the future as the messages that flowed as written correspondence, in the networks of the Republic of letters have been for contemporary historians. Have they been saved by the individuals involved? Is the analogy a misguided one and we should regard e-mail as analogous to the telephone and accept that, as librarians and archivists, realistically it is not our concern.
Another special form of the personal archive may well be special electronic "cabinets of curiosities" assembled by individuals drawing on sources from all over the world. In the eighteenth century one travelled abroad or commissioned a traveller known to one or entered into a correspondence to acquire the items one wanted for one's cabinet. Now, for similar purposes one continues to travel but virtually, in new ways made possible by the Internet and in the privacy of one's study without ever leaving one's desk. The electronic cabinet of the late twentieth century might well contain in electronic form all of the kinds of items found in the physical form, even if only as pictorial reproductions, in the cabinets of the seventeenth century.
In principle these files are of the greatest value for the biographer, the historian, the literary critic and others, just as their physical counterparts were. The more such archives or "cabinets" contain, the greater their potential value. Electronic personal files, where they exist constitute a far greater problem for libraries and archives than paper documents. They will be found in attics and cellars and at the bottom of drawers and boxes at long periods after their creation, perhaps at long periods after the death of their authors. They cannot be appraised visually. To be examined, they require software and hardware that has so far become quickly obsolete. With the passage of time they may not easily be converted from one format to another if at all. As industry standards become more widespread and inter convertibility easier, some of these technical difficulties will lessen. Thus, how to acquire these files and from whom and how to manage them even to read them will constitute, are currently constituting, important challenges for the librarian and archivist who will need to create for themselves or at least have close access to museums of computer hardware and software and to technical specialists who will become system archaeologists and cryptographers.
A Seamless Web and its Challenges
As electronification of information sources increases, and as libraries, archives and museums increasingly deal with electronic records, an extension, a realignment, perhaps a transformation of functions is occurring between these historically determined organisational arrangements for handling information artefacts. It may be that for libraries, for example, the increasing volume and variety of information available in electronic form may not only require them to re-define their archival function as discussed in this paper, it may also change their relationship to their traditional materials. If paper is largely replaceable for every day library use by text in electronic form, then libraries will begin to view paper sources differently. Perhaps some of the paper-based sources will be for current casual use to be superceded by electronic forms for preservation and storage (or perhaps, surprisingly, the reverse may occur in certain circumstances with paper being the easiest and best storage medium). The analogy here is to the cumulation on microfilm of the issues of newspapers and journals that are then discarded when the microfilm copy becomes available. The question may well become: why would one wish to retain materials in printed form, except for what they represent as atefacts, if their texts can be cost effectively transferred to electronic systems which provide better storage and access capabilities?
Some print sources, however, may have artistic or evidential or rarity or exemplary value that electronic versions of the same text cannot replicate. These will tend to be relatively few in number, if past experience is anything go and may well be concentrated in the great research libraries. What is fundamentally important about them is their physicality as books and manuscripts. Thus functionally they become little different from traditional museum objects and libraries in this respect become as to some extent some of them always have been museums of print.
It is becoming clear that the notion of the electronic "gateways" has major implications for the relative roles of libraries, museums, archives, network developers and managers and others in maintaining the systems that provide access to local collections. For example, it should be possible to create hypertext connections between a text and footnote references in the text so that access can be had to complete sources whether the references be to manuscripts, archives, library materials, maps, museum or gallery exhibits or even to sound in the case of works related to music, say, or anthropology or ornithology. The electronically accessible collected works of Rembrandt might consist of links to images held electronically in museums in different locations throughout the world and a catalogue raisone might automatically link the compiler's text held in a central location (his or her own computer) to each image wherever it is held. This new functionality as it emerges creates the need for new definitions of the roles and responsibilities of "collecting" institutions, network providers, users, and "authors" of the new kinds of resources.
In sum, as collecting organisations become more and more concerned with electronic information they will take on the character of complex databases and information systems held locally for universal access through the Internet. While they continue to deal with what is their characteristic non-electronic sources, because of the need for the continued physical existence of these sources as artefacts for special use, they will function effectively as museums have in the past.
One thing is clear from all of this. The availability of increasing volumes of information in electronic form and the emergence of new kinds of electronic information sources are presenting fascinating professional challenges for librarians, archivists, museum curators and other "information professionals." How they meet these challenges will determine how well the organisations under their care will continue to respond to the information needs of their various publics. Libraries, museums and archives represent different institutionalised organisational practices and professional cultures that have been evolving over the last several hundreds of years. These cultures, because the practices central to them have been directed at different kinds of artefacts, have defined themselves to some extent in opposition to each other. Being able to respond to contemporary challenges effectively may will largely depend on how well the different kinds of "professionals" are able to transcend the limitations that their highly developed cultures impose on them so that they can work across the ever diminishing boundaries that separate them.
References
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W Boyd Rayward is Professor of Librarianship and Dean of the Faculty of Professional Studies, the University of New South Wales, PO Box 1 Kensington, NSW Australia 2033. A version of this paper was given at a conference sponsored by the British Academy in 1991 and appears in its proceedings as "Electronic Information and the Functional integration of Libraries, Museums and Archives," in Electronic information and Historians: European Perspectives. Edited by Seamus Ross and Edward Higgs. (Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, Halbgaue Reihe zur historischen Fachinfomatic, A20; St Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1993), pp. 227-243
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