Building the Forever Memory

InstitutionSmithsonian Collaborations:

Libraries, Archives, & Museums

ASIS&TVancouver, BC11 November 2009

Martin R. KalfatovicSmithsonian Libraries

'Forever' institutions such as libraries, universities, museums are especially important in uncertain times because they provide stability and continuity

G. Wayne Clough, 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

Vast, But Not Infinite

“I assumed you packed the library in 1,000 volume boxes, each box having a capacity of precisely one cubic meter. All space to the farthest known spiral galaxies would not hold the Universal Library. In fact, you would need this volume of space so often that the number of packed universes would be a figure with only some 60 zeroes less than the figure for the number of volumes… The figure is not infinite, it is a finite figure.”

- Kurd Lasswitz, “The Universal Library.” 1901

• 100 characters (Western European languages, plus spaces and some punctuation)

• Each line has 50 spaces• Each page is 40 lines long• Each book is 500 pages long• Total Books: 100 1,000,000

• Googolplex: 1 followed by a googol (10 100) zeros

Vast, But Not Infinite

The sum of our collections, Libraries, Archives and Museums is Vast, but by most practical – and even impractical counting methodologies – it is finite. Vast, but Finite!

Vast, But Not Infinite

The Memex

In 1945, Vannavar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, outlined the ultimate tool of the near term future, the Memex, in the article “As We May Think”

ARCHIVES

LIBRARIES

MUSEUMS

Memory Institutions

As an agent of change, printing altered methods of data

collections, storage and retrieval systems, and communications

networks used by learned communities throughout Europe

- Elizabeth L. EisensteinThe Printing Revolution in Early Modern

Europe (1983)

Memory Institutions: Museums

Memory Institutions: Museums

26,000,00021,000,0005,000,000Harvard Univ. Herbarium/Mus. Comp. Zoo.

30,000,00021,000,0009,000,000American Museum of Natural History, New York

58,877,30050,000,0008,877,300Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

60,200,00055,000,0005,200,000Natural History Museum, London

83,000,00078,500,0004,500,000National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC

TotalAnimal Specimens

Plant SpecimensInstitution

Memory Institutions: Museums

Art works: Stephen Weil calculated (in 1990) that in the U.S. alone there were over 8 million art works created:

• 200,000 working artists• 40 works per artist• 8 million total works per

year!

Memory Institutions: Museums

Memory Institutions: Museums

Memory Institutions: Museums

But Is It Google-able?32 million published

books750 million articles

and essays25 million songs500 million images500,000 movies3 million videos, TV

shows and short films

100 billion+ web pages

• Compressed (at today’s standards) this would be about 50 petabytes (about the size of a small-town (U.S.) library building)

But Is It Google-able?

“The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it”

- Vannevar Bush (1945)

“The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it”

- Vannevar Bush (1945)

• 19 Museums & Galleries• 9 Research Centers• 18 Archives• 1 Library (with 20 branches)• 1 Zoo

• 137 million objects• 26.8 million visitors• 188.8 million web

visitors• ~ 6,000 staff

Why Collaborate

• Wherever• Whenever• Whatever

Challenges

• Create a virtual Smithsonian

• Make content relevant

• Meet stakeholder expectations

Create

• Digitization Strategy

• Digital media use policy

• Web and New Media strategy

Quick Win: Flickr Commons

Collection Information Systems

SIRIS

ArtCISNMAH CIS

NASM CIS ACM CIS NMNH RCIS

NPM CISNMAI CIS

Collection Information Systems

SIRIS

ArtCISNMAH CIS

NASM CIS ACM CIS NMNH RCIS

NPM CISNMAI CIS

Archival Storage

Images, Sound, Video

DAM

Collection Information Systems

SIRIS

ArtCISNMAH CIS

NASM CIS ACM CIS NMNH RCIS

NPM CISNMAI CIS

Enterprise Digital Asset Net(EDAN)

Metadata Archival Storage

Images, Sound, Video

DAM

Collection Information Systems

SIRIS

ArtCISNMAH CIS

NASM CIS ACM CIS NMNH RCIS

NPM CISNMAI CIS

Enterprise Digital Asset Net(EDAN)

Metadata

Parent & Child

Scientist EnthusiastColleague

Archival Storage

Images, Sound, Video

DAM

Collections.si.edu+2million records | 265,000 images

Each object in the Museum … would have been associated with a book (or several books) in the Library. However, there would also be many books which could not correspond with any exhibit (the natural history of unicorns, for example, or the geometry of round squares) …

The Natural History of Unicorns

…One had then … a perfectly balanced edifice, in which everything which the human mind is capable of inventing or understanding has its place.

- Andrew Crumey, Pfitz (1995)

The Natural History of Unicorns

Thanks!