Introduction to digital archives

Archives can offer reliable evidence of previous documents from an individual, a community, an institution, or even a nation. With the passing of time, archives will become time capsules with former memories, helping the next generation have a better understanding of what happened before.  (See the detailed definition)

With the swift changes in the Internet era nowadays, both the archives and archivist have transformed their role to a digital style. Digital archives may break the boundary of physical storage, and prolong the life of archives, which is meaningful for the aspect of preservation.

“A digital archive is similar in purpose to a physical archive, but the historical documents and objects have been digitized (often by scanning or photography, unless a document was created digitally in the first place) and made available online.

Previously, I held the stereotype that digital curation only refers to digitize the archives and preserve the materials online, after researching I found a broader definition of that.  it seems to be in a dynamic state covering larger range, in which additional data will be enrolled into archives  continuously, instead of holding the existing data only.

Digital curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital research data throughout its lifecycle.”

Digital curation is much more than digitalizing the archives or collections. With the development of technologies nowadays, digital archives generated from social media can be able to provide valuable resources for academic use. In the following post I will mainly focus on how researchers make a use of digital archives on Chinese social media, which is different from the methods used in museums and galleries.

About the blog

“digital archive”的图片搜索结果

Hi and welcome! I’m Shulin Hu.

I graduated from Communication University of China and currently is a master student in University College London, majoring in Digital Humanities.

This blog is about the management of digital archives. More specifically, I will show how the galleries or archival museums manage the electronic content in a proper and efficient way by using different approaches. Although I’m not from a professional background of archive, within the research process I gradually found that there are many interesting ideas included in these digitization projects, which may provide lots of inspirations for further research or working. Different institutions may choose various storage systems and commercial models according to diverse needs. I mainly use three cases as my backup: The Parliament Archives, Tate Galleries and Dorset History Centre and analyze them separately, in order to dig out the rationales of why the staff choose this method and how they adapt to the new workflow. My goal is to explain this topic from an understandable way and let those people who have few background like me to learn the detailed knowledge in managing and preserving digital archives.

Critically speaking, my blog may be weak in firsthand surveys, since I have not interviewed the staff working in museums or galleries in real-life nowadays. Fortunately, the cases I choose are not outdated. So many findings in this project are likely to offer new perspectives for the archivists who have a desire to transform their roles from traditional manager to modern digital curator.

All my data and concepts are from the academic papers or relevant websites. You can check the links of references if you want to know more about certain point. Feel free to cite sentences or apply the framework of this blog. (Licensing scheme)

Hope you have a happy experience when reading it and glad to receive any questions or suggestions for me!

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