United We Stand, Divided We Fall:
Organizational Identity and Institutional Collaboration

Within the last twenty-five years, libraries, archives and museums have experienced a crisis of organizational identity. Historically, these institutions had been in service of things: books, documents, and objects, respectively. Their employees collected, organized and preserved these things; though they would permit the public to peruse these things, use was considered an unfortunate necessity that interfered with the primary mission. Radical changes in society forced these institutions to reconsider their roles or face obsolescence. Very slowly, they began to acknowledge that they must promote service to people as their primary mission.

This shift in organizational identity has affected nearly all the institutions in these fields, yet for some this has resulted only in apparent change – alterations in surface details without substantial impact (as described in the theory of Pasquale Gagliardi). Others have implemented the incremental change that Gagliardi claims is necessary for an organization to truly shift its core identity. One significant element of this incremental change for libraries, archives and museums is their willingness to embrace collaboration among themselves to improve their service to the public.

For information seekers, organizational boundaries function only to impede access to information. It may matter to a librarian whether a particular book is owned by her library or by the library in the next county, but the patron doesn’t care who owns it, as long as he can get it and read it. In order to optimize service to users, collaboration among institutions is necessary.

Libraries adjusted to this idea much more swiftly than archives or museums; in fact, libraries were forming member consortiums in the United States as far back as the nineteen-thirties, long before any identity crisis set in. The digital age brought this idea to fruition with the ability to share electronic catalogues. Resistance to this change came from organizations who were reluctant to abandon their autonomy and adopt uniform cataloging methods. The obvious benefits of these alliances have convinced even the most grudging libraries to accept standardization, and now most libraries participate in some form of collaboration.

Archives and museums have been much slower to implement this kind of incremental change. Only since the turn of the century have archives have begun to adopt similar standards for ensuring uniformity of cataloging records, which permits them to share these records within a collaborative group. Encoded Archival Description is a standardized method of recording metadata that creates an electronic finding aid, one which remains constant in different browsing platforms. Embracing EAD has allowed archives to provide fuller access to geographically dispersed collections.

One case in point is an alliance called the Northwest Digital Archives. The NWDA is comprised of 29 member institutions in the Northwest. Each member contributes a yearly membership fee and EAD-encoded finding aids for its collections. Researchers can access the collections of all 29 archives with a single search feature. Just as searching a library catalog returns only its MARC record, and not a scanned full-text electronic book (that’s another impending shift!), searching the NWDA’s site returns only the finding aids, and not the items in the collection itself. In order to actually peruse the documents themselves, a researcher would still need to visit the archive or request that a researcher send copies.

Like libraries before them, archives will have to embrace collaboration, despite the internal changes in organizational procedures and structures which it requires.

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Hatch, M. J. (2006). Organization theory: Modern, symbolic, and postmodern perspectives (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.