Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community: Academic Libraries and Museums in Collaboration

Academic libraries and museums foster many outstanding collaborations supporting teaching, learning, and research within their respective institutions. These collaborations, like other progressive activities, require significant invisible labor, caretaking, and resources that have not always been documented.

Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community collects examples of successful academic library-museum collaborations and serves as critical knowledge for the cultural heritage sector. Authors from libraries and museums across the United States demonstrate how to develop and execute partnerships and bring forth new dimensions of transdisciplinary objects-based pedagogy, research, and learning centered on inclusive educational practices. Chapters explore visual thinking strategies and the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education in the undergraduate classroom; restoring Indigenous heritage through tribal partnerships; using object-based teaching to motivate student research; and much more.

The collaborative approaches highlighted here demonstrate the power of possibility when two collections-centric entities unite to enrich our collective understanding of materiality, instructional approaches, and the importance of provenance. Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community also illustrates why interrogating past practices and value assignments within academic library and museum collections is essential to advancing culturally relevant approaches to knowledge sharing in physical and digital spaces.