Museum Informatics and Information Infrastructures: Supporting Collaboration across Intra-Museum Boundaries

Abstract

This paper examines the development of an information infrastructure involving collaborative technologies at the Spurlock Museum, a museum of world history and culture at the University of Illinois. It details a socio-technological system that was designed to pack and re-locate 45,000 artifacts across campus to a new museum facility. It addresses the question of how the information infrastructure of the Spurlock promotes collaboration among the various departments at the museum working on this move and encourages the sharing of common data resources across internal museum boundaries.