the community early in the project. I also propose that frequent interaction, either

through phone conversations or visits, may allow for the most productive partnerships.

Balancing Community Agency

      As a museum attempts to increase community agency while simultaneously

"gate-keeping" museum records, there are a number of issues a museum must consider

to promote a healthy relationship with contributing communities. Daniel Spock (2009,

10), Director of the Minnesota History Center Museum, explains, "Museums will still

have to negotiate thorny mergers and challenging relationships, in effect balancing the

desire to engage a wider community while maintaining some core sense of institutional

selfhood." Throughout the project, I have continued to struggle with this seeming

paradox between the facilitation of power-sharing and the maintenance of the

museum's informational integrity. While inviting participants to share their knowledge,

questions arose concerning how much agency I should foster in the wiki. I needed to

consider the preservation of the Florida Museum's records and the technical integrity of

the wiki site. I originally planned to assign "writer" wiki access to each participant. This

would have allowed participants to not only make comments, but also to add and delete

images and information on each page. Instead, participants do not have editing

capabilities, but are invited to comment on the page content by typing into a comment

box. While one objective of the wiki was to increase Native agency in defining the

collection, I feared that the hundreds of hours I had invested in formatting the wiki pages

would be altered or erased. This issue underlines the need for trust and relationship-

building not only for Native contributors, but for wiki administrators as well. Had I

established a relationship with a small group of community members who I felt would

take the time to heed specific editing procedures, I may have increased editing