LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums) as Portals

Posted November 12, 2025 by Michaela O'Gara-Pratt

Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk, thinking about how if I was being recorded, it would not be obvious that I lived in the year 2025. 

At one of my jobs, I am currently processing a series of VHS tapes from the 1990s. Each day I am in the office, I spend hours popping in tapes, fast-forwarding and re-winding to capture specific details to write accurate descriptions of the material. The nostalgia has not worn off yet, and each time I slide one of the VHS tapes into the machine, I am transported back to being five or six years old and watching all of the programs my family owned on tape. Favorites included Angelina Ballerina, Kipper the Dog, and a series of home videos that my parents had recorded. 

The interior design of my library is also a little timeless. The cream walls and carpeted floors could be from any decade, and the material it holds literally is. There is something comforting about being able to drift between timelines, hopping between the present and the past as I switch between my AV cart and my laptop signed into Microsoft OneDrive. 

In addition to my library job, I am also a Museum Teacher at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It is easy to refer to the Gardner Museum as a portal. When Mrs. Gardner died in 1924, she stipulated in her will that each gallery stay exactly as she left it. The current Museum staff have taken her request seriously, and therefore very little has changed about the museum in the last century. When the Museum is closed on Tuesdays, or open late on Thursdays and barely a visitor is around, it is easy to imagine Mrs. Gardner walked through the halls, doting on her artwork. Even though my life and Mrs. Gardner’s never technically overlapped, in many ways we have. Mrs. Gardner’s museum is her autobiography and she still plays an active part in it. When I give tours of the Museum, I sometimes feel the same in-between that I described in the library. It could be 2025, but it could also be 1920. 

One of the architectural elements in Mrs. Gardner’s museum is called a “portal” and it acts as the connection between the Spanish Cloister and the inner courtyard of the Museum. When I step through this doorway and confront the “impossible garden” that lives through all four seasons of New England’s weather, I feel transported away from reality. Mrs. Gardner’s museum becomes a fantasy realm, the closest I can get to the magic I was promised as a child reading too many books. 

As librarians, archivists, and museum professionals, we are all a little in awe of the material we get to work with. We get to time travel in a way few other professions do. It is easy to let the thrill of the job distract us from the challenging realities of the field: underpaid positions, understaffed institutions, and the infamous bulk problem, but it is also nice to remind ourselves about why we got into the field in the first place. How lucky are we, as SLIS students, to basically be attending magic school?