Exploring convergence: Digitized multimedia collections among museums, archives, and libraries.

Digital multimedia as a more-than-text document type crosses the boundaries of museum, archive and library enterprises. The traditional functions, practices, and missions of these organizations are merging as they address the care taking and provision of access to digital multimedia objects. Internet access to these enterprise services and objects may be opening up each organizational type to wider audiences with a broader base of information needs and less experience with traditional enterprise specific information structures. Discussions of integrated intellectual access, resource discovery, finding aids, and cross-domain metadata are becoming more prevalent in professional gatherings. These discussions provide topics of convergence for museum, archive, and library information systems information sharing. In initial descriptions of their areas of expertise and experience, panelists will touch on these topical foundations as well as digital object representation schemes, information organization structures, information system design, and cultural descriptions of the management issues associated with the three types of information systems.