Knowledge Organization within the Museum Domain: Introduction

This special issue is concerned with knowledge organization in the museum domain, exploring the standards and processes for structuring and managing museum knowledge. Museums, like libraries and archives, are memory institutions for recording, preserving, and disseminating the history of material culture. Museums and their collections are exceedingly heterogeneous, reflecting the fields of art history, natural history, anthropology, and the sciences. The diverse range of museum objects necessitates complex and specialized KOSs to describe their materiality and context. Museum knowledge organization is object- and context-specific, sensitive to the unique instantiation of an object and its temporal, geospatial, and cultural relationships. This timely special issue on museum knowledge organization reflects contemporaneous challenges and, more broadly, an adoption of information science methodologies and practices within the museum sphere.