Archives, libraries, museums and the spell of ubiquitous knowledge

Abstract

This paper describes the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums in Germany from traditional brick-and-mortar institutions to a digital memory institution on the Internet. An implementation of such a digital memory institution is BAM-the joint portal of archives, libraries, and museums in Germany. BAM has the potential to serve as a single point of access to existing, but separate offerings of the several branches of cultural heritage, e.g. union catalogs, and a great number of separate digitization projects offering their content on the German Web. BAM can make an important contribution to the efforts of both the German governments (federal and states) and the European Union, which are in the process of establishing portals to cultural content on the Internet. The article gives an outline of the current undertakings and illustrates how the striving for ubiquitous knowledge delivered by Internet portals relates to the scientific tradition of documentation in Europe.

Neuroscience without borders: Preserving the history of neuroscience

“…Why not develop a virtual museum of neuroscience, including libraries and archives? Why not develop a digital "History of Neuroscience | 2107 EDITORIAL Museum" (Dempsey, 2000;Kirchhoff, Schweibenz, & Sieglerschmidt, 2009). Europe should have an International Museum of Neuroscience based on networking the neuroscientific institutions in every part of Europe to preserve and explain the scientific and cultural events in the development of neuroscience in each European country.…”

Dari Samudra untuk Dunia: Penominasian Arsip Tsunami Samudera Hindia sebagai Memory of The World (Mow) UNESCO

“…Arsip juga merupakan bagian penting dari warisan budaya sebuah negara yang harus dijamin aksesibilitasnya (Fredriksson, 2003). Oleh sebab itu, Peran lembaga kearsipan menjadi sangat penting sebagai lembaga pelestari warisan budaya bangsa seperti halnya institusi warisan budaya lainnya seperti museum dan perpustakaan (Kirchhoff, 2008).…”

Swimming the Channels: An Analysis of Online Archival Reference Enquiries

“…More recently, Kirschoff et al have described the increasing profusion of archival information systems, digital libraries and other cultural databases as "digitisation islands" [9]. Archival users must undertake the difficult task of moving between these unconnected islands but little literature exists on how skilled they may be at achieving this.…”

“…Kirchhoff et al [9] advocate creating portals linking the islands together to solve this pervasive problem of users not knowing where to go. Interestingly, TNA now provides a form of portal, or federated search, through its Discovery search system that indexes archives across the UK and a number of other formally separate dat abases.…”