Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals

This article introduces the concept of Dynamic Collaborative System (DCS) as an evolutionary model for digital libraries, designed to foster adaptability, user participation, and enriched knowledge ecosystems. Drawing on a critical review of literature spanning organizational complexity, digital literacy, artificial intelligence ethics, and technology acceptance frameworks, the DCS is conceptualized as a platform that integrates curated digital collections, collaborative tools, and AI-powered management features. Digital libraries are reframed as sociotechnical systems in which users actively contribute to the interpretation, enrichment, and dissemination of content. The article outlines key design principles supporting the DCS architecture and examines its broader implications, including the need for institutional resilience, ethical data governance, and inclusive metrics of impact. Proposed future research directions address the sustainability and scalability of the model across various library contexts. Ultimately, the DCS is presented as a viable and necessary approach to reimagining digital libraries as dynamic spaces for knowledge production, community engagement, and ethically grounded technological innovation.

In 2025, the University of Idaho Library’s Special Collections and Archives accepted a donation of nearly 2000 political buttons, a collection type traditionally not held by archives. This case study documents archivists’ experiences processing and providing access to this artifact collection using existing archival infrastructure and expertise, including ArchivesSpace for item-level artifact description, standard archival supplies for storage, and CollectionBuilder for digital access. The project required adaptation and problem-solving at every step, from developing a flexible numbering system to imaging artifacts with flatbed scanners. Our experience illustrates LAM (library, archives, and museum) convergence as a matter of stretching archival practice rather than formal collaboration with museum experts. Despite encountering challenges such as time-intensive processing and limited experience handling artifacts, we have found the collection to be a valuable resource for instruction, exhibits, and research. This case study demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations of adapting archival practice to three-dimensional artifacts.

What happens when a multitude of communities unite for a common cause? In an era of American politics marked by funding uncertainties, the active exclusion of marginalized stories, and censorship of museum exhibitions, does the future look bleak, or does it signal a call for a heightened sense of creativity? This case study highlights a multi-institutional partnership in which professionals from various disciplines collaborated with the local Black descendant community to plan a Memorial Ceremony honoring some of Evansville, Indiana’s earliest Black residents. This collaboration helps to minimize the erasure of Black history and ensures that these narratives are included in America’s historical tapestry.

This paper discusses teaching an upper-division art history undergraduate course within a special collections and university archives unit of the university’s library. It highlights using primary source and rare materials to align the course learning outcomes with the practical cultural heritage work of archives, work that is done across libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), and underscoring the synergy between academic teaching and archival practice.

This case study explores play-based approaches to digitization as innovative strategies for enhancing user engagement with special collections. The article discusses how traditional digitization often fails to capture the tactile nature of physical archives, especially three-dimensional objects. The authors, librarians at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library, discuss how they incorporated aspects of play into the curation, digitization, and description of physical collections. They outline their approach as illustrated in the creation of digital collections for the Historical Board Games, the Gwendolyn Brooks Collection, and the Ricker Materials Collections. Incorporating play and experimentation further promotes the discovery and use of materials beyond traditional methods of physical access.

Models depicting normal human anatomy have been a feature of Western medical teaching since the Renaissance. Some were collected by McGill University’s medical museum after its founding in 1821. In 1907, a fire in the medical building destroyed virtually the entire collection. Many models were purchased to replenish it during the following sixteen years. The majority of these, as well as those acquired after 1923, were consolidated in the Maude Abbott Medical Museum (MAMM) in 2012. We undertook a review of all models acquired by McGill’s Medical Museum/MAMM since the start of medical faculty calendar records in 1852/1853. A total of 433 were identified, of which 323 are still present. We discuss the uses of this collection and speculate about how 110 models have been “lost.” The review provides an understanding of the use of models in anatomy teaching in one North American university during the past 175 years.

This case study provides an overview of two guidance packs that the author created for the GSA Library, the first of which concerns advisory notices and the second of which concerns subject indexing and classifications. In an effort to share good praxis, this article includes real examples of item-level advisory notice text as well as a set of flowcharts that were designed to help GSA Library staff with the tasks of inclusive description.

This paper presents a reflective account of the AHRC-funded Provisional Semantics project, which focused on how museums and heritage organizations might produce search terms, catalogue entries and interpretation using ethical and equitable practices, particularly in relation to the artworks and histories of racialized and minoritized people, and in the context of a digitized national collection. As the project developed, the emphasis shifted toward a more fundamental enquiry into whether these objectives were achievable, given the structural racism and colonial logics inherent in the museum project and its conventions, histories, and infrastructure. Through a critical discussion of the project’s three case studies, the paper considers the following questions: what happens when we change words and clean data as a putative solution to problematic cataloguing? Can museums genuinely, equitably, and ethically represent multivocality? Why is embedded change in attitudes and behaviors hard to achieve and slow to happen? And is sector guidance for research and documentation fit for purpose in terms of genuine knowledge co-production and engagement?

Museums still struggle with colonial data legacies within collections management systems, building mechanisms to be “inclusive” but challenged by how to model more expansive post-colonial ways of thinking. Although it anticipated a need to be “inclusive” of Native knowledge in the original design of its CMS, the National Museum of the American Indian is still challenged by the processes for how knowledge is entered into the system and by which information is seemingly “centered” within the system. Following on the release of the Smithsonian’s new Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns policy, the NMAI is rethinking documentation structures within its CMS based on its dialogue with Native communities, conversations with other Smithsonian museums, and discussions with CMS colleagues. The museum is questioning why certain knowledge seems prioritized over others. Is this a fault of the system classification methods or our own practices? Can we re-envision CMS relationships to center Native knowledge?

This paper examines a collaborative approach to the assessment and updating of object records held at the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum (DLB). The Museum is the primary repository of objects and documents relating to the life of David Livingstone (1813–1873). Livingstone is renowned for his travels throughout the African continent and subsequently, a third of the collection originates from Africa. The language used for both the classification and description of objects contained outdated, racist and colonial references to peoples, communities, and territories. Similarly, the omittance of acquisition information reflected dominant museum collecting practices of the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. In order to dismantle these Western-centric cataloging conventions, DLB collaborated with local African diaspora community groups, international museums, and heritage organizations from Malawi and Botswana. A series of case studies illustrate knowledge production through oral history and object biography to create records that include multiple voices.

In 2021, the Promoting Exhibit Access and Safety (PEAS) Working Group surveyed attendees at four cultural heritage conferences to get a broader perspective on institutional processes and procedures at the intersection of access and safety. Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents said their institution had experienced challenges with detrimental visitor interactions (DVI). Respondents also shared an assortment of strategies used to prevent such interactions, such as signage, display cases, physical barriers, and gallery attendants. In 2023, PEAS conducted a series of discussion sessions with museum professionals from across North America to better understand these strategies and their effectiveness. The sessions followed a structured list of questions that were designed to build upon the results of the survey and elicit open and transparent conversations. The following article is a summary and analysis of those discussions.