UKOLN | Cultural Heritage
Collections
Archives, libraries and museums all view the items they hold as ‘collections’. However, the criteria they use to define ‘collection’ vary, resulting in different approaches to recording descriptions of collections and the individual items within them.
For archivists, the individual item is an integral part of a group of items that forms the record on an individual or organisation and the description of such a grouping is a fundamental (and standardised) part of archival practise. To an archivist, a 'fonds' collection description denotes a collection that has been accumulated by an individual, business or organisation in the course of their life or work. This may be distinguished from an artificial collection, which does not originate from the same source, but consists of archives that have been brought together and described as a whole. They may, for example, be on the same subject, relate to the same geographical location or be of the same form (e.g. photographs). Archivists have developed their own metadata schema for archival documentation.
Libraries have focused on description of individual items – the individual records in a catalogue – but have always used the concept of ‘collection’ in their management of these resources. Collections are defined by various criteria – e.g. location, subject, form, use type, bequests by individuals, audience – but where descriptions were provided these tended to be more informal and less structured. Descriptions at collection level were most often found in directories of libraries with collections on specific subjects. Many of the collections held by libraries do not have a fixed set of items – new titles will be added and other titles withdrawn over time – but other collections, for example those donated by a benefactor, do not change in this way.
Museums also use the concept of ‘collection’ using various criteria – e.g. form or type of object, subject, objects donated by an individual benefactor – to describe and manage these groupings. Traditionally, museums have recorded inventory type documentation, including information on provenance and value, but did not make this publicly available at the point of display. It should be noted that although a small museum might display all the items it holds, larger museums display only a proportion of their holdings and store the remainder. The emergence of digital technology, resulting in the creation of surrogate images of items, has changed requirements with regard to both item level and collection level description.
The practice of creating ‘collection level’ descriptions is not new to the different curatorial traditions, but there is an increasing need to improve the effectiveness of digital resource discovery techniques, especially where users want to search across the distributed holdings, both digital and physical, of several institutions. It is in this context that ‘collection level description’ across curatorial traditions has developed.
