The Conceptualization of Archival Materials Held in Museums

Abstract

This thesis examines the perspectives of museum curators on the nature and description of archival material held in Croatian museums. The research emanated out of personal speculation that the arrangement and description of archival and other documentary material found in museum settings are dependent on how curators determine what constitutes archival material, what constitutes a museum object or museum documentation, and what might potentially be both. Arguing also that the path to any kind of interoperability starts with the people who implement these descriptive standards, this exploratory study uses ethnographic methods, including interviews, observation and autoethnography to investigate curators’ understandings of archival and documentary materials held in their museums (i.e., rather than in archives).The research was guided by the following questions: How do museum curators conceptualize archival records and other materials within their institutions? How and why do records and other archival materials come to be treated as museum objects? What happens to archival material in museum settings in terms of its description? Do museum professionals see any possible convergences between archives and museum materials in terms of description and access in museum collections, and if so, what might those be? The study identifies and analyzes their conceptualizations of and attitudes towards the records that surround them in their daily professional practice (both those they collect and those they create) as well as towards their description of those records. It also contemplates how museum curators perceive the role of the descriptions they create when these are to be placed online in an environment where there are no longer institutional boundaries and the anticipated audience is not socially restricted. The historical situation of archival material in Croatian museum collections is also discussed in a way that offers insights into national regulatory practices as well as the perspectives of both archival and museum professionals in Croatia. However the thesis also points out that these problems are not just the result of Croatia's historical particularities but are also present worldwide in any situation where archival material constitutes part of museum collections. 174 The findings of the study indicate that the conceptualizations of the museum curators who were interviewed regarding records, properties of those records, and how both are or should be represented through description, vary in relation to how they personally conceive of the concept of a record (their individual cognitive framework), how the concept of a record is discussed in contemporary archival discourse and practice (professional frameworks), the parameters set by relevant archival and museum laws and regulations in Croatia (juridical framework), and the contemporary socio-political context (societal framework). The thesis concludes that the matter of description in the end becomes the matter of access and that descriptive processes that take place in Croatian museums are indeed determined by museum professionals in the course of their daily work, although they are also circumscribed by institutional policies and practices and juridical requirements such as legislation and regulations, and influenced by both historical and contemporary societal contexts. These findings suggest that description could potentially serve as mechanism by which means the boundaries of individual repositories, professional communities and nations could be bridged. Given that curatorial conceptions are exercised in such a central way in museums, such bridging could only be successful, however, if it were based upon a robust understanding of what curators understand and internalize as significant concepts and values in the museum context, such as those that are surfaced through this research.