Linking museums and libraries

Abstract

Access to information about museum collections is especially important in university museums because of the academic nature of their missions. This paper proposes the use of a ubiquitous tool to provide an additional access point to information about museum collections: the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Integrating museum objects with the library's monograph collections gives users access to great amounts of potentially relevant information. I have examined a case study conducted at the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in which LCSH were attached to object records in the museum's database. It was found that LCSH were not efficient tools for the project, therefore, I have examined the possibility of a new tool to do the same work: the LC Class Web.