The Future of Museums and Libraries

There’s an interesting discussion going on regarding the future of museums and libraries. Referred by some as “memory institutions”, these “LAMs” (Libraries, Archives, and Museums) are looking at ways to collaborate to better provide quality resources for people in the digital age. OCLC produced a report in 2008 that explores how memory institutions can collaborate best. In addition to the institutions collaborating, they envision a world where

“users add their knowledge to information resources through mechanisms such as social tagging or community annotation. These social systems enhance the utility of the materials presented while enriching and supporting the institutional descriptive effort by ‘absorbing community knowledge.’ Innovative and evocative means of user engagement enables the capture of the associative response to collections, not just the facts about them.”

Like publishers, these institutions are scrambling to figure out how to best serve the community/consumer in this time of rapid change.