Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the modern museum, as the latter emerges from the scholarship of the History of collecting, is its ability to contain and generate knowledge in an ordered and systematic way. The paper traces the history of the modern concept of the museum against the history and philosophy of information, looking at museum collections as objects derived from and contingent on notions peculiar to information history and philosophy such as the notion of the index and the archive. The cases of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and the Bodlean Library also in Oxford are analyzed.