On the LAM: Library, Archive, and Museum Collections in the Creation and Maintenance of Knowledge Communities

People have been gathering things into collections for a long time. The resulting collections might be informal, but when they are institutionalized and sustained over time, they are typically referred to as libraries, archives, and museums. There are good reasons why libraries, archives, and museums have evolved on separate paths, but the information age arising around new information and communications technologies brings them together as never before. The objective of this paper is to disentangle libraries, archives and museums in historical context to show the key commonalities of collecting in the creation and maintenance of the knowledge communities that enabled the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. The focus then turns to the changes in the concept of collection in the emerging information age, and the challenges facing the traditional patrons of collecting. Throughout the paper we refer to the broad world of library, archive, and museum collection by the abbreviation LAM. The use of this acronym as a plural proper noun is intended to highlight the commonality of these remarkably separated worlds of work, even as we trace the pathways of their separate evolutionary development. Ultimately, we argue that the differences among the separate worlds of libraries, archives and museums should be subordinated to the emerging need to strengthen what we call the epistemic infrastructure of the knowledgebased economy through a new view of collecting and collections.