Information about museum objects is often cumulative,
and paper-based museum recordkeeping systems typically
accommodate layers of inconsistent, incomplete and incorrect
information. Collection information is often scattered
by discipline and format, with relationships between
these records maintained as part of the institutional
memory. Depending on the type of museum, some information
has been considered sensitive, including provenance,
donor or purchase price and collection location of endangered
species. In the past, individual curators and their assessment
of the user’s need to know have determined the
level of access to collection information. With increasing
pressure to make collection records available online
to an unknown audience, museums must choose which information
to disclose and how to indicate the existence of additional
information. This presentation, focusing on how natural
history museums have dealt with this problem, is part
of the research for papers to be submitted to the virtual
museum theme issues of the Journal of Internet Cataloging,
of which Bernadette is guest editor, and the Journal
of Digital Libraries.
Bernadette Callery presently serves the Carnegie Museum
of Natural History as the Head of the Library and Archives.
As a lecturer in the University of Pittsburgh’s
Department of Library and Information Sciences, she teaches
the Museum Archives course and hosts field placements
for archives students at the University of Pittsburgh
and Duquesne University and has offered a workshop on
Museum Archives at Simmons College. Interested in museum
recordkeeping systems, particularly as those systems
move from paper-based records to electronic records,
she has presented papers on various aspects of museum
records at meetings of MARAC, MAC, the Natural Science
Collections Alliance, the Council on Botanical and Horticultural
Libraries and the Society of American Archivists. Her
teaching and research investigate the development of
museum recordkeeping systems and archives as evidence
of change in institutional policy and practice, a continuation
of her dissertation research (University of Pittsburgh,
2002)
Prior to her appointment at the Carnegie Museum, she
was Research Librarian at the New York Botanical Garden
and Librarian at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation,
where she taught, lectured and published in the areas
of botanical illustration and botanical bibliography.
She returned to the New York Botanical Garden in 2002
as a speaker in the Plants in Medicine, Art and Culture
lecture series, celebrating the opening of the International
Plant Science Center at the New York Botanical Garden.
She co-curated the major exhibition “Nature’s
Mirror: 200 Years of Botanical Illustration” held
at the New York Public Library in 1989 and several exhibitions
at the Hunt Institute, most notably “The Tradition
of Fine Bookbinding in the Twentieth Century” in
1979. Active in the Council of Botanical and Horticultural
Libraries, she received the Council’s Charles R.
Long award for professional excellence in 1997.
For more information on Bernadette and her activities,
please see:
http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmnh/library/calleryweb/index.htm |
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