ABSTRACT
Museum professionals are responsible for large numbers of information resources, from physical museum artifacts to electronic documents about museum collections. As managing such resources in their original form can be difficult and time-consuming, museum professionals tend to rely on principles of information representation to create information surrogates or aggregates that can be manipulated more easily. Surrogates arise from the process of taking information entities and making them physically or informationally smaller (e.g., creating catalog card records), while aggregates arise from the process of creating a single resource that represents groups of information entities based on shared data (e.g., making a list of all artifacts accessioned in the same year).
