Museum archives are built for insiders, not the public

When the National Gallery of Art released its first online public archives catalog, I covered the launch in a reported news story examining the gap between what the museum promised and what users can actually access.

The response from archivists was swift and pointed, insisting the system was simply reflecting standard archival practice.

This is the second op-ed of a two-part series that explores what that reaction revealed—not about the NGA alone, but about the archival profession more broadly.

The National Gallery of Art’s new online archive is not an isolated misstep. If anything, the defensive reaction from archivists—insisting that everything the NGA did is “standard”—shows that the deeper issue is systemic. The public is being asked to navigate tools built for insiders, wrapped in language that promises access but delivers opacity.

A profession-wide pattern

The tool at the center of the NGA debate is ArchivesSpace. Launched in 2013 after years of development, it was created through the merger of two existing professional tools, Archivists' Toolkit and Archon. These systems were designed to handle the complex, hierarchical nature of paper records and special collections—a methodology inherited directly from traditional library science and card catalog systems.

ArchiveSpace privileges the finding aid, which is the digital descendant of the paper index used in reading rooms. The finding aid organizes records by provenance, meaning who created them, and hierarchy, which is logical for historians but opaque for the public searching by keyword.

The project was championed by major research universities, including New York University, the University of Illinois, and the University of California-San Diego and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

As the Reddit thread unfolded, several archivists argued the NGA’s archive wasn’t flawed because: “This is what ArchivesSpace looks like, everywhere.” They listed URLs—Harvard, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Denver Public Library, Museum of Flight—with nearly identical layouts and limitations.

At one level, this was meant to reassure me. At another, it strengthened the argument: if all these archives look the same—and all present the same lack of clarity and lack of recent materials—then the issue is structural, not individual.

That’s when it became clear the problem wasn’t the NGA. It was the system.

The semantic sleight of hand

Archivists accused me of misunderstanding their terminology, but the deeper problem is that their terminology has never been designed for public comprehension. Words like “archive,” “accession,” and “processing” carry specialized meanings that function only inside the profession.

When institutions adopt these terms in public-facing communications, they create a semantic sleight of hand: the word “archive” promises access, while the archival definition delivers an index. This might work in a graduate seminar, but it collapses the moment a federally funded institution uses plain-language messaging to describe a tool whose constraints only make sense to insiders.

The burden for clarity is not on the public. It is on the institutions that insist on broadcasting specialist vocabulary without specialist context.

The finding-aid problem

Archivists defended the NGA’s launch by insisting that ArchivesSpace and its hierarchical finding aids are the professional standard. That is precisely the issue. The standard itself is fundamentally inadequate for public-facing transparency.

ArchivesSpace privileges internal workflows over intelligibility, obscuring the scope, completeness, and chronology of collections. A user cannot tell whether they are viewing 5% or 95% of a director’s papers, nor whether entire eras are missing because they are unprocessed or because they were never transferred.

For a federal cultural institution that chose to frame its archive as a public resource, relying on a tool never designed for public users is not a neutral decision—it is a structural limitation the profession has normalized rather than confronted.

Tradition is not a defense

The most common refrain from archivists was that the gaps in the NGA’s archive reflect “how archives work.” But tradition is not a defense when museums voluntarily market themselves as transparent civic institutions.

The archival field has spent decades relying on systems built for scholars who already know what they are looking for, not for the broader public whose taxes support these collections. When a FOIA-exempt institution adopts these internal systems as its public transparency mechanism, the limitations cease to be technical. They become governance issues.

If archives are going to serve as the only window into an institution’s administrative past—as is the case with the NGA—then the field must reckon with the reality that its inherited structures obscure as much as they reveal.

What struck me most in the archivists' responses was the assumption that the public should adapt to archival norms rather than the other way around. This is a professional blind spot.

If the average user cannot navigate a public-facing archive without internal training, that is not a user error—it is a design error. Archivists often speak of stewardship and access, but the systems they champion communicate something else entirely: that access is conditional, navigable only by those fluent in a specialized hierarchy of series, subseries, and processing notes.

The archival field is entitled to its internal standards. It is not entitled to insist that the public find those standards sufficient for a public archive.

The strongest arguments against my position—acknowledged

Archivists made two compelling points worth addressing. First: archives are not current-operations transparency portals. They are repositories for processed historical material. They are “time machines, not surveillance cameras.” This is a coherent worldview.

But the NGA itself never explained this to the public—and the expectations I apply come directly from the NGA’s press release, not from a misunderstanding of archival norms.

If the museum launches a “public” archive, users will reasonably assume it reflects what the museum is able to share—not what it chooses not to share. And since the NGA is not subject to FOIA, this becomes the de facto transparency portal.

Second: the real issue is congressional funding. Archives operate under chronic budget constraints. The work of accessioning, processing, and describing collections is slow and resource-intensive. But budget limitations do not absolve institutions of setting realistic public expectations. If this were the EPA, limited funding would not justify launching a system that conceals decades of environmental data.

If digitizing item-level access for 86,000 resources is impossible, NGA leadership made a strategic choice to launch a tool that satisfies neither internal nor external needs.

A public archive, or a costume?

Museums say they want transparency. They say they want to “open the archives.” But opening an archive is not the same as explaining it. And explaining an archive is not the same as making it usable.

If the NGA lacks the resources, then that itself is a story. If digitizing everything isn’t feasible, the institution should articulate a clear prioritization strategy. If this launch was merely a first step, the public should know what that roadmap looks like.

Right now, institutions want the appearance of transparency without the burden of providing meaningful transparency. The NGA’s new archive is the profession’s perfect illustration of this divide.

If a database is meant only for insiders, it should be kept internal. If it is meant for the public, it must meet the public where they actually are.

Otherwise, a public archive is not a public archive at all. It is a professional tool wearing a public costume.

Museum Archives, Part II: A profession built for insiders, not the public