Presentation for American Society of Information Science and Technology /The Catholic University of America, School of Library and Information Science Student Chapter. April 25, 2003. Washington, DC.

1. The Natural History of Unicorns Museums, Libraries, and Technology Collaborations Martin R. Kalfatovic Head, New Media Office Smithsonian Institution Libraries

3. The Museum

12. Types of Museums

14. Brief History of Museums

26. The Library

28. The Museum Library

36. The Museum Library “ If you are located in the SI Library spaces on the east side of the Natural History Building you may be smelling a burning odor right about now. It is the result of [a curator] in Minerology cutting a meteorite and failing to use exhaust fans.”

37. Museum Technology

38. Museum Technology : Librarians vs. Museum Catalogers “ Museums catalogue unique objects, made and existing under unique conditions, bearing unique histories. While published books tend to be defined by the information on their title page or within their covers, museum objects are almost always defined and catalogued as a result of a series of attestations and opinions that are not attributes of the object qua object, but rather of the scholarly and other changing worlds that surround the object….

47. Smithsonian Institution Libraries

48. Smithsonian Institution Libraries Charles Coffin Jewett , the first librarian of the Smithsonian, made important contributions to the field of cooperative cataloging

57. SIL Digital Technology

61. Museum/Library Collaboration

70. Museum/Library Collaboration

73. Museum/Library Collaboration

78. “ Carry it further” “ Although the ‘Biologia’ contains the record of such a large number of species, it is but a fragment of what may yet be obtained. The whole work must be looked upon as only a contribution to our knowledge of the subject, and I hope it may be an incentive to others to carry it further” - F. DuCane Godman (1916, Zoological Society of London )

79. “ An inordinate fondness for beetles ” Biologist J.B.S. Haldane remarked that “the Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles, and so we might be more likely to meet them than any other type of animal on a planet that would support life.”

80. N atural History of Unicorns And as for the Library (which was linked to its neighbour by a system of passageways whose subtlety would extend almost beyond the possibility of symbolic representation), here there lay mysteries which were greater still. The same Classification was used as in the Museum - the two buildings forming mirror images each of the other … 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)….

81. The Geometry of Round Squares The fact that these books greatly outnumber those whose function is to catalogue the exhibits next door means that the overall size of the Library (despite the density of its shelving) is equal to that of its neighbour …. 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)

82. http://www.sil.si.edu/staff/asist-2003/