n.a document or artifact perceived differently by people with different points of view that nonetheless helps them cooperateStar and Griesemer 1989, 393The second important concept used to explain how museum workers managed both diversity and cooperation is that of boundary objects. This is an analytic concept of those scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds (see the list of examples in the previous section) and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local need and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.Yakel 2002, 122It is in finding aids that users’ representations of archives meet archivists’ representations of collections. If these two cognitive representations intersect enough, the user is able to locate and utilize the archives and to identify primary sources that may hold the answer to his or her inquiry. If these representations diverge, the access tools are useless for the researcher. Creating finding aids that are true boundary objects is key.Ketelaar 2005, 55One might look to the joint archival heritage of communities of records as a ‘boundary object’ which connects two or more communities.Yeo 2008, 131If a report or a procedure manual can be seen both as a record and as an information product, it can be denominated a “boundary object.” Sociologist Susan Leigh Star developed the concept of boundary objects in the 1980s. They are entities shared by different communities of practice. Each community may interpret or use them in a different way, but “the acknowledgement and discussion of these differences . . . enable a shared understanding to be formed. . . . The boundary object serves as an interface among these communities.”Conway 2010, 430Yeo’s theory, when applied to digitized photographs, postulates that boundary objects constructed from archival sources carry with them their archival nature and exist as “persistent representations” of an event or activity at one or multiple points in time and space. The extent to which users interpret and trust the archival properties of boundary objects such as digitized photographs is an open question.Huvila et al. 2014, 430Anderson finds the boundary object concept particularly fruitful for recognising informative artefacts (books, documents, records, citations or other informative representations) as socio-material forms. She draws on notions of inscription and alignment closely associated with the boundary object construct to position these representational devices as central actors in the structuring of practices and technologies as alignments of both material and discursive practice. In this way the focus turns from representation as mental activity to inscription as social activity.Botticelli 2020, 139–140In essence, the Peabody’s initial digitization of the H boards has resulted in a series of “boundary objects” that can effectively inhabit the conceptual spaces of both the museum and the archives, as mediated by the Peabody’s use of TMS Curating Digital Surrogates in a Museum Archives: The Historic Boards Collection at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and the Collections Online portal.
