Rayward's paper and associated activities

Libraries, museums and archives in the digital future: The blurring of institutional boundaries by W.Boyd Rayward, November 1995.

Having read the section titled The Functions of Libraries, Museums and Archives I will now attempt to answer the questions that have been set by the Uni.

• What information is each dealing with? LIBRARIES are focused on acquisition (printed material/journals/books) with inter library loans to address gaps and specific clientele. MUSEUMS concentrate on all living (botanical) an non-living such as, artefacts denoting a time in a place in society. All items are stored and viewed in context complete with explanation. These may specialise, e.g. Railway museum. ARCHIVES are the collection of daily documents of a government/organisation (authors not identified) to track changes/incidents over time . Eg maps, printed documents, motion pictures, photographs....

• How different is it? LIBRARY - Our local library is a very busy colourful place/space with regulars, visitors attracted by the programs and changing offerings. each week there is a story time for pre-schoolers and during the school holidays activities are provided for children. Plenty of borrowing of current books takes place as well as DVD's and other multimedia.
  
  
  MUSEUM - All information presented is extended beyond the item and included era, habits, size, location, diet - a complete 'story' of facts as researched by others. A busy place with people moving through and returning at a later date for different promotions. Quite an educational place to visit.
  
  ARCHIVES- Documents of by-gone era's saved for future generations to use for individual research pursuits.
  A quiet business-like place with limited space and an increasing clientele going online.

• How does it change what information we might want to organise and retrieve? It seems that there is a place to store just about everything...but where does it stop. Obviously space will ultimately be used up and hard copies will no longer be kept, instead resorting to scanning and saving information on the computer in an effort to free up space.

I found Helen Rowlings comments on the forum to be very helpful in clarifying lots of this information for me. Thank you for your input Helen.