Memory Institutions

"Memory Institution" is a fancy name given to libraries, museums, and archives. While it may sound pretentious, it is actually very fitting for what these entities do. Basically they collect, preserve, and make accessible through time the world's culture, knowledge, and information. Each have a specific type of material and way in which they work with it, but all have a shared educational focus and commitment to the preservation and access to knowledge.

• Libraries - work with individual, non-unique items, they are user-driven repositories.
• Museums - work with specific, unique items, they are curator-driven and provide curatorial context for objects
• Archives - work with a unqiue group of works, they are research-driven, and maintain a particular context for the overall collection

Relevant readings:

• Augst, Thomas. Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion. In The Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, ed. Thomas Augst. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007: 148-183.
• Eaton, A. W., & Gaskell, I. (2009). Do Subaltern Artifacts Belong in Art Museums? In J. O. Youngessor & C. G. Brunkessor (Eds.), The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (pp. 235–267). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Gilliand, A. (2011). Neutrality, social justice and the obligations of archival education and educators in the twenty-first century. Archival Science.
• Harris, Michael. "The Purpose of the American Public Library." Unpublished manuscript. 1972.
• Malone, C. K. (2000). Toward a multicultural American public library history. Libraries & Culture, 35, 77-87.
• Schwartz, Joan, & Cook, Terry. (2002). Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Archival Science, 2(1/2), 1-19.
• Weigand, W. (1989). The development of librarianship in the United States. Libraries & Culture, 24(1), 99-109.