MUSEUM LIBRARIANS What’s wrong with museum libraries ? Libraries and museums both have similar missions: they acquire, describe and make accessible records of human experience. But what is the perceived importance of a library within a museum? The role of museum libraries could be described in special library terms – to provide information to support the activities of the museum, especially its research – and one could assume that such libraries do play an important role in their information-intensive organisations. However, the status of museum libraries, as well as their influence, is less clear than this. In 1996 Esther Bierbaum published an article on this subject, based on a survey of 152 r andomly selected museum libraries2. Her conclusion was that museum libraries do not fare well within their parent organisations. There are several measures of departmental status within an organization. One is funding; another, staffing and services, and a third is utilization. By the fi...
Mirrors the Traditional Past