How a museum knows? Structures, work roles, and infrastructures of information work

Even if knowledge is a commodity that a museum offers as Hooper-Greenhill has argued, the mechanisms of how a museum comes to know what it mediates are not well understood. Using a case study approach the aim of this study is to investigate what types of sources and channels, with a special emphasis on social processes and structures of information, support collaborative information work and the emergence of knowledge in a museum environment. The empirical study was conducted using a combination of ethnographic observation and interviews of staff members at a medium-sized museum in a Nordic country. The study shows that much of the daily information work is routinised and infrastructuralised in social information exchange and reproduction of documented information and museum collections.