In researching a historical case, the authors do acknowledge the character, type, and distribution of the data resources to which they were limited: “The more limited work discussed in this paper is, in part, conditioned by the historical record - for us as scholars, scientific publications are the boundary objects which are also obligatory passage points! Records concerning the entrepreneurs who served as administrators of the museum are kept in the central archives of the university which housed the museum. Records concerning the many other elements of the network of such amateur collectors who contributed specimens to the museum and articles to naturalist society newsletters are not equally centralized. Nevertheless, it is important not to mistake the search heuristic of starting with the centralized records for a theoretical model of the structure of the network itself” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 396).
