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Designing collections for storytelling: purpose, pathos, and poetry

Introduction: While cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums, may orient themselves toward different purposes, collection design and description form a common means by which these institutions work to achieve their goals. Across the cultural heritage landscape, there has been growing recognition that the composition, structure, and description of these collections creates an interpretive frame through which each item in the assembled group obtains a contextualized meaning. In the archives context, Duff and Harris (2002) contend that collection description is a form of storytelling. But what constitutes a good story in the collection context? This paper identifies and describes three textual elements with which collection descriptions might tell vivid, evocative stories: purpose, pathos, and poetry. Method: The paper synthesizes literature from bibliography, cultural studies, and literary studies and uses this framework to examine two collection descriptions. Both these case studies arise from an activist context, in which an underrepresented group seeks to preserve, document, and publicize its resources. Conclusions: To reach wider audiences, collection authors should elucidate not only the larger purpose for a collection, but show the significance of collected items in furthering that purpose. Collection authors should also consider clarifying the emotional resonance of their materials for those outside the initiating community. In providing this additional information, collection authors may enable their audiences to construct their own poetic reimaginings of the collection. Beyond collections with an activist orientation, this study suggests that an audience-centered, as opposed to user-centered, design mode may be productive for any collection and associated description.