Museum Libraries and Archives in the Digital 21st Century

Abstract

Libraries and archives in museums have evolved from creating online catalogues and finding aids to digitization projects, which often involve social media interventions and other engagements with the wider public, including crowdsourcing. Beyond collecting or giving access to PDF files and e-books, fewer museum libraries and archives have grappled with the more challenging problems of born-digital art-rich websites. Even fewer museum libraries and archives have begun to exploit the possibilities of digital art history, including visualization, geospatial analysis or computer vision. Museum libraries (and art libraries more generally) have reached a pivot point, where their responsibility will be to explain the possibilities of the digital world to those rooted in the physical, and what can be learned from the physicality of items or collections of items (such as an archive) to the digital native.