Format For Cooperation: Cooperative Collection Registers at the Peabody Museum of Salem and the Essex Institute

Abstract

F. Gerald Ham wrote in 1981 that interinstitutional cooperation is an essential feature of a complex and interdependent technological society. Many cooperative strategies have been implemented in an attempt to reap the potential benefits of interdependence. Most cooperative archival projects, however, are concerned with collection development, often in association with archival networks. These are laudable projects that set standards for future collection development on a massive scale, but there are other ways in which cooperation can enhance archival activities. One such activity could be to improve access to collections currently divided between two or more institutions. How can repositories perform reference services for the universe of available material on a subject or individual when they possess only a portion of that information? The Peabody Museum of Salem (Mass.) and the Essex Institute have initiated a project that begins to address this issue through the implementation of cooperative collection registers. This essay analyzes the nature of the libraries' respective collections, discusses the relationship between their collecting policies and the need for this form of cooperation, and explains the development of a format for the intellectual unification of physically divided collections. It concludes with a discussion of other possible applications of this format. The Essex Institute and the Peabody Museum of Salem, situated within a block of each other, have collected historic documentation since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The majority of the manuscript collections consists of the papers of Salem merchant families whose ships participated in trade with ports in India, China, and other Asian and European countries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The two institutions have a history of cooperation that extends back to 1867, when the Peabody Academy of Science (a parent organization of the Peabody Museum) and Essex Institute established an informal cooperative collections policy. The institute regularly