Museum and archives are often talked about as similar. However, objects have little or know meaning without the documentation and do not speak readily with you without documentation. By the time an object has gotten to the museum, it may already been removed from context. Context is incredibly important in place of your  body of records. And that's the challenge!

What we know of them, there intended use, their place of origin, their name has to be constructed by a variety of records.

Making any sense of objects in a museum is that you depend on the connection you make with the audience, the viewer, or the archivist to the object.

But museum also have manuscript collections. These collections serve and support exhibitions.





Updated July 10, 2010