Building the
Forever Memory
Institution
Smithsonian Collaborations:
Libraries, Archives, &
Museums
ASIS&T
Vancouver, BC
11 November 2009
Martin R. Kalfatovic
Smithsonian Libraries

'Forever' institutions
such as libraries,
universities, museums
are especially important
in uncertain times
because they provide
stability and continuity
G. Wayne Clough, 12th
Secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution

Vast, But Not
Infinite
“I assumed you packed the library in 1,000
volume boxes, each box having a capacity of
precisely one cubic meter. All space to the
farthest known spiral galaxies would not hold
the Universal Library. In fact, you would need
this volume of space so often that the
number of packed universes would be a
figure with only some 60 zeroes less than the
figure for the number of volumes… The
figure is not infinite, it is a finite figure.”
- Kurd Lasswitz, “The Universal Library.” 1901

Vast, But Not
Infinite
• 100 characters (Western
European languages, plus
spaces and some
punctuation)
• Each line has 50 spaces
• Each page is 40 lines long
• Each book is 500 pages long
• Total Books: 100 1,000,000
• Googolplex: 1 followed by a
googol (10 100) zeros

Vast, But Not
Infinite
The sum of our collections, Libraries, Archives and
Museums is Vast, but by most practical – and even
impractical counting methodologies – it is finite. Vast, but
Finite!

The Memex
In 1945, Vannavar Bush,
Director of the Office of
Scientific Research and
Development, outlined the
ultimate tool of the near
term future, the Memex, in
the article “As We May
Think”

LIBRARIES
ARCHIVES
MUSEUMS

Memory Institutions

As an agent of change, printing
altered methods of data
collections, storage and retrieval
systems, and communications
networks used by learned
communities throughout Europe
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern
Europe (1983)

Memory Institutions: Museums

Memory Institutions: Museums
Plant Animal
Institution Total
Specimens Specimens
National Museum of Natural 4,500,000 78,500,000 83,000,000
History, Washington, DC
Natural History Museum, 5,200,000 55,000,000 60,200,000
London
Musee National d'Histoire 8,877,300 50,000,000 58,877,300
Naturelle, Paris
American Museum of 9,000,000 21,000,000 30,000,000
Natural History, New York
Harvard Univ. 5,000,000 21,000,000 26,000,000
Herbarium/Mus. Comp. Zoo.

Memory Institutions: Museums
Art works: Stephen Weil
calculated (in 1990) that in
the U.S. alone there were
over 8 million art works
created:
• 200,000 working artists
• 40 works per artist
• 8 million total works per
year!

Memory Institutions: Museums

Memory Institutions: Museums

Memory Institutions: Museums

But Is It Google-able?
32 million published
books
750 million articles
and essays
25 million songs
500 million images
500,000 movies
3 million videos, TV
shows and short
films
100 billion+ web
pages

But Is It Google-able?
• Compressed (at
today’s
standards) this
would be about
50 petabytes
(about the size
of a small-town
(U.S.) library
building)

“The world has
arrived at an age
of cheap complex
devices of great
reliability; and
something is
bound to come of
it”
- Vannevar Bush (1945)

“The world has
arrived at an age
of cheap complex
devices of great
reliability; and
something is
bound to come of
it”
- Vannevar Bush (1945)

• 19 Museums & Galleries
• 9 Research Centers
• 18 Archives
• 1 Library (with 20 branches)
• 1 Zoo

• 137 million objects
• 26.8 million visitors
• 188.8 million web
visitors
• ~ 6,000 staff

Why
Collaborate
• Wherever
• Whenever
• Whatever

Challenges
• Create a
virtual
Smithsonian
• Make content
relevant
• Meet
stakeholder
expectations

Create
• Digitization
Strategy
• Digital media
use policy
• Web and
New Media
strategy

Quick Win: Flickr Commons

Collection Information Systems
ArtCIS NPM CIS
NMAI CIS NMAH CIS
NASM CIS
ACM CIS NMNH RCIS
SIRIS

Images, Sound,
Video
Archival
Storage
Collection Information Systems
ArtCIS NPM CIS
NMAI CIS NMAH CIS
NASM CIS
ACM CIS NMNH RCIS
SIRIS
DAM

Enterprise Digital Asset Net Images, Sound,
(EDAN)
Video
Metadata Archival
Storage
Collection Information Systems
ArtCIS NPM CIS
NMAI CIS NMAH CIS
NASM CIS
ACM CIS NMNH RCIS
SIRIS
DAM

Enthusiast Scientist
Parent Colleague
& Child
Enterprise Digital Asset Net Images, Sound,
(EDAN)
Video
Metadata Archival
Storage
Collection Information Systems
ArtCIS NPM CIS
NMAI CIS NMAH CIS
NASM CIS
ACM CIS NMNH RCIS
SIRIS
DAM

Collections.si.edu
+2million records | 265,000 images

The Natural History of Unicorns
Each object in the Museum …
would have been associated with a
book (or several books) in the
Library. However, there would
also be many books which could
not correspond with any exhibit
(the natural history of unicorns,
for example, or the geometry of
round squares) …

The Natural History of Unicorns
…One had then … a
perfectly balanced
edifice, in which
everything which the
human mind is capable
of inventing or
understanding has its
place.
- Andrew Crumey, Pfitz (1995)

Thanks!