User:Yingxue-Wang2/Museum informatics

Museum informatics is an interdisciplinary field of study that refers to the theory and application of informatics by museums. It is in essence a sub-field of cultural informatics at the intersection of culture, digital technology, and information science. In the context of the digital age facilitating growing commonalities across museums, libraries and archives, its place in academe has grown substantially and also has connections with digital humanities. In all ages, museums are responsible for obtaining, storing, and exhibiting objects of different kinds of objects from art, cultural heritage, natural history, science, to technological inventions. However, modern museums are not only repositories of objects; they are repositories of knowledge. They are more like an information service organization, store information and share knowledge.

After years of studies, the museum professionals and visitors have found their understanding of roles museums play largely changed by the introduction of new information technologies in museums. Today’s visitors to museums expect instant access to large amount of information about every object in the museum’s collections. As the needs and expectations change, the users of museum information resources are galvanizing museums to make appropriate changes. Besides, museum researchers and professionals have began to explore the impact of information science and technology on the people who use museum resources.

History
The earliest references to museum informatics in English are from Archives and Museum Informatics a newsletter and journal published on the subject from 1987–1996. In the early 1990s, museum informatics projects and services developed at numerous American universities. Cultural informatics was introduced into library and information science education in 2000 at the Pratt Institute School of Library and Information Science in New York. Graduate courses devoted to museum informatics were offered from at least 2001. PhD theses were using "museum informatics" in the title by 2004. By 2007, an academic reader, Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums, edited by Paul F. Marty and Katherine Burton Jones, was published as part of the Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science.

For the past few decades, we have witnessed unprecedented changes with respect to the use of museum information resources. The changes have resulted in new levels of information sharing, accessing and new forms of interactions between museum professionals and visitors. These changes have manifested most clearly in the relationships between museums, museum websites, and museum visitors.

Museums are at a turning point in history, as a ‘technology-driven mutation’ in the evolution of ‘cultural heritage institutions’ is going to redefine the domain and blur boundaries for museum institutions. The future of museums is beginning to be shaped by computer scientists who are serving for the museum missions in the recent tradition of museum operation. What's more, the introduction of new information resources and technologies in museums has considerably changed the understanding of the role of museums for museum visitors.

Resources
To get a better understanding of informatics in museums, we need to consider the various recourses which museums need.

Among the many types of information resources that are crucial to museums, the most important information one that any museum possesses is its collection of artifacts.

The extensive information that museum professionals possess about the objects is of equal importance compare to the artifacts themselves. For example, when a museum acquires a new collection of exhibits, information about each object will be expertly recorded and sorted by Museum professionals. These museum professionals also need to record specific data about each object such as nomenclature classifications, physical dimensions, material analyses, designations, artifact histories, scholarly remarks, research notes, etc. Except for that, they are responsible for maintaining related information resources such as donor files, accession records, exhibit histories, research studies, temporary loan records, visitor attendance reports, information requests, etc.

Information Management in Museums
https://marty.cci.fsu.edu/preprints/marty_mmc2007.pdf

https://marty.cci.fsu.edu/preprints/marty_elis2010.pdf

The shape of things to come: museums in the technological landscape