Challenges With the Digitization of Archives
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This document discusses three challenges with digitizing archives: 1) Ethics around digitizing archives from countries with a colonial history, including ensuring access, ownership, capacity building, and compensation. 2) Creating user-friendly finding aids for digital collections. 3) Managing born-digital materials. Several case studies are provided exploring participatory approaches, digitization projects in Africa, and collaboration on digitizing special collections.
Challenges With the Digitization of Archives
- 1. Challenges With the Digitization of Archives ?
- 2. Three Challenges Explored 1. Ethics with archives in countries with a history of colonialism a. Theoretical Application b. Practical Application 2. Creating user-friendly finding aids 3. Born digital materials
- 3. Ethics of archives in countries with a history of colonialism Lor and Britz (2003), A Moral Reflection on the Information Flow From South to North: an African Perspective Information-based component to human rights: the right of freedom of access to information needed to exercise all other basic human rights, the right of freedom of expression, and the right of individuals and groups to use and control self-generated information.
- 4. Lor and Britz (2004), Digitization of Africa’s Documentary Heritage: Aid or Exploitation? Projects are in partnership with the country of origin; Original materials are returned to the country of origin; Access to digitized resources are available to scholars and students in the country of origin; Capacity building, or the training of digital archiving staff is undertaken; Compensation is provided, if appropriate, to institutions within the country of origin
- 5. CAPACITY BUILDING Schultz (2013), “Supporting Capacity Building for Africa: Initiatives of the Cooperative Africana Materials Project (CAMP) Since 1995”, details projects in Senegal and Uganda. Microfilm projects laid groundwork for digitization.
- 6. CAPACITY BUILDING In 2010, hundreds of boxes of papers from the Kabarole District Archives in Uganda were digitized, preserved, and stored at Mountains of the Moon University. The district still owns the material, which was scanned by an MMU lecturer and his students.
- 7. Pei Jones Collection - University of Waikato, New Zealand Digitized according to tikanga Māori (Māori cultural protocols) Māori subject headings created Artifacts arranged by genealogy and historical context Users, especially Māori, are encouraged to participate in the development of the web library.
- 8. Farley (2014): Participatory Finding Aid and The Archivist Users at the J. Y. Joyner Library at East Carolina University and University of Massachusetts at Amherst Special Collections are encouraged to contribute annotations to the digitized collections. This creates metadata or links to other web pages, provides corrections, or adds anecdotes and other information.
- 9. Hidden Collections: The Hornung Papers Englishman “Pitt” Hornung owned sugar plantations in present-day Mozambique in the late 1800s. His archives, deposited in the West Sussex Record Office, are “hidden” because of repository specific barriers and collection specific barriers.
- 10. Hunter, Legg, and Oehlerts (2010) A metadata librarian, an archivist, and a digital projects librarian at Colorado State University in Fort Collins collaborate on the digitization of University photographs taken between the 1880s and 1930s.
- 11. Born digital materials Daigle (2012), Digital Transformations of Special Collections Goldman (2011), Bridging The Gap: Taking Practical Steps Toward Managing Born Digital Collections in Manuscript Repositories