There have been a  number of interesting comments lately on the issue of
museum collections and cataloguing.  Putting together Eugene Dillenburg's
inquiry about public perception of the importance of the richness of
collections (and what goes on behind the scenes) and Marianne Cavanaugh's
note that librarians have been interested in cataloguing standards for much
longer than museums highlights a distinction between museums and libraries.
 Libraries have been interested in public access to collections much longer
than museums.  And the public perception of the value of library collections
is very strong.

It seems to me that the idea of public access to museum collections, growing
out of the ability of computers to facilitate visual access without object
handling, offers museums a great opportunity to exapnd public support for
what we do.  We have managed public support for exhibitions with great
finesse, but that is a small percentage of what is "behind the scenes."   The
efforts and needs growing out of our mandate to collect and preserve could
benefit from increased public understanding and the kind of public value that
gets attached to accessible library collections. There are lots of challenges
of course - developing cataloguing standards to serve diverse audiences,
teaching people to read and understand objects the way we teach them to read
and understand books, balancing access and preservation, developing a balance
between scholarly control and shared authority regarding the meaning of
objects........

My background is in history which undoubtedly colors my perception of this
issue.  In the limited experiments we have done with public access to
collections via computer, the response has been so positive that I am
encouraged to think that people do in fact care about the richness of
collections and would care more if they knew more.  We've had the same
experience as the Field regarding the discrepancy between positive response
to the experience of collection access and an inability to imagine any
benefit in the theoretical environment of a focus group.  I'd be very curious
to know what others think on the topic.

Deborah Cooper
Museum Collection Coordinator
Oakland Museum of California
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