Linking museums and libraries

Access to information about museum collections is especially important in university museums because of the academic nature of their missions. This paper proposes the use of a ubiquitous tool to provide an additional access point to information about museum collections: the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Integrating museum objects with the library's monograph collections gives users access to great amounts of potentially relevant information. I have examined a case study conducted at the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in which LCSH were attached to object records in the museum's database. It was found that LCSH were not efficient tools for the project, therefore, I have examined the possibility of a new tool to do the same work: the LC Class Web