Library databases are searchable sites that hold academic journals, periodicals, DVDs, conference proceedings, dissertations, and/or more!
Many articles in our databases have full text available within the database - that means you can read the entire article. If it's not available through linked or PDF full text, check Journal Titles and try to navigate to the volume, issue, and pages to see if full text is available. If full text is not available, you can use interlibrary loan to have the text sent from another library (for free!).
View a 3-minute video on how to access databases from UofM's website, and utilize the links below to access recommended databases.
Museum Collections Management: A handbook by
"Collections Management is a relatively new term in museums, and yet it is fundamental to what museums do and why they exist. To collect, display, care for and access museum objects, was and remains the core purpose of our museums and galleries. Recently the term has come to be synonymous with database systems to store and generate information on collections, but in its wider sense, it encompasses all the activities of those engaged in caring for our national heritage. The purpose of this book is to answer all questions from what is collections management and why it is important, to how to classify objects or draw up a contract for a shared acquisition. As such, this is the first publication of its kind to act as a comprehensive and practical guide to collections management."
Museum Object Lessons in the Digital Age by
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.
