Reading the book, Five Laws of Library Science (1931), by the father of Indian Library Science, S. R. Ranganathan, inspired me to become a librarian. Today, while thinking about the difference between libraries, museums, and archives, I recalled Ranganathan's Fifth Law of Library Science: A Library is a growing organism.
As we know, living organisms ingest, digest, and excrete. So do libraries. Acquisitions is ingestion, while information competency instruction is all about promoting good digestion. To remain responsive to curricular necessities a community college library is also constantly excreting, sanitarily called "deselection" (which used to be called "weeding"). Libraries are growing organisms.
Archives and museums ingest and digest but are less prone to excretion. According to ODLIS, the Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science, archives are about preservation. Archives preserve noncurrent records, usually in a repository like the photo of the Toronto archives above, in this post, for "their permanent historical, informational, evidential, legal, administrative, or monetary value." Museums are about "the preservation and display of collections of physical artifacts and specimens."
Archives and museums are needed and useful cultural institutions, but their emphasis on permanent preservation, as opposed to the Library's instrumental preservation, indicates they are serving an important purpose, but one different from the Library. Archives are not about circulating their collections to the public, to take home to further learning. Museums are not systematically organized to meet the information needs of a specific user population, the way academic libraries are.
The Peninsula College Library mission indicates a purpose more focused on intellectual digestion of information to promote student learning: "To serve the information needs of the students, faculty, staff and community in an environment that nurtures learning and fosters freedom of intellectual activity."
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