The Scent of the Digital Archive: Dilemmas with Archive Digitisation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9348Keywords:
digital history, e-humanities, digital humanitiesAbstract
Archival infrastructure is changing at a rapid pace as a consequence of digitisation. The effort to digitise analogue collections seems to have benefits only for researchers. Still, only a fraction of analogue archive material is currently available in digital form. This article raises some of the problematic aspects about the practice of digitising analogue collections and their consequences for historical research. The dilemmas that confront archivists and historians are not easy to resolve: the digitisation of analogue collections is leading to two costly and co-existing infrastructures, while archival collections that are not digitised risk becoming marginalised.
This article is part of the special issue 'Digital History'.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c) Authors are permitted to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
Authors are explicitly encouraged to deposit their published article in their institutional repository.