During the coronavirus pandemic, digitizing archives can help increase access. But in addition to the labour and financial costs, issues of privacy, copyright and resources need to be considered.
A re-imagined production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was cancelled five days before opening.
Anne-Louise Sarks
In a year of lockdowns, The Impossible Project gives life to shows that never reached the stage. More than 150 events are listed on this online archive, and sadly, more are likely to come.
Canada lags behind some countries with preserving public digital records.
(Flickr/BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives Canada)
Policymakers should mandate Canada’s national library to archive the entire Canadian web domain so future reserachers can make sense of 2020 and ongoing responses to the pandemic.
Ruth Stuart, the filmmaker of To Egypt and Back with Imperial Airways (1933)
EAFA
There are many gems of female filmmaking in the archives that have been overlooked and should be made accessible to contemporary audiences
Two Marines in the Marine Corps’ 5th Division cemetery on Iwo Jima pay their respects to a fallen comrade.
United States Marine Corps Film Repository, USMC 101863 (16mm film frame)
Centuries’ worth of important information is stored on paper – which can decay, burn or get eaten by pests. Peek inside the process of making all that data digital.
Today, and into the future, consulting archival documents increasingly means reading them on a screen.
(Shutterstock)
As our societies lose paper trails and increasingly rely on digital information, historians, and their grasps of context, will become more important than ever.
Idi Amin at a press conference in Jjaja Marina, Uganda in July 1975.
Courtesy of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Hidden for decades in a vault at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, the photographs depict a regime fixated on establishing order, meting out punishment and stoking nationalism.
Mukurtu is a Warumungu word meaning “dilly bag” or a safe keeping place for sacred materials.
Nina Maile Gordon/The Conversation CC-NY-BD
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Nina Maile Gordon, The Conversation
Mukurtu: an online dilly bag for keeping Indigenous digital archives safe.
The Conversation71.5 MB(download)
Mukurtu - Warumungu word meaning 'dilly bag' or a safe keeping place for sacred materials - is an online system helping Indigenous people conserve photos, songs and other digital archives.
The National Library of Australia recently launched the Australian Web Archive - a historical record of Australian web content.
Shutterstock
The National Library of Australia’s web archive preserves online Australian content dating back to 1996. The next step is to archive platforms such as Facebook and Twitter - but it won’t be easy.
An 1811 wood engraving depicts the coronation of King Henry.
Fine Art America
In 1811 a former slave named Henry Christophe anointed himself ‘First Monarch’ of the ‘New World.’ For 10 years, he ruled over a part of modern-day Haiti, becoming a global media sensation.
There is no clear cybersecurity governance framework geared towards detecting and preventing attacks against digital identity assets.
Digital identity assets, such as property records and Parliamentary proceedings, embody who and what Australia is as a nation. We need to do more to protect them.
Team member Felix Knight looks through archives at the Church of Espiritu Santo in Havana, Cuba.
David LaFevor
The Slave Societies Digital Archive documents the lives of approximately 6 million free and enslaved Africans in the Americas.
For centuries, Pulter’s manuscript lay untouched at the University of Leeds’ Brotherton Library.
University of Leeds Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32
In a time when women were expected to be silent, no topic was off limits for Pulter, who penned verses about politics, science and loss. Her manuscript was just published in a free digital archive.
With a lot not on display, museums may not even know all that’s in their vast holdings.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
A tiny percentage of museums’ natural history holdings are on display. Very little of these vast archives is digitized and available online. But museums are working to change that.
An artist’s illustration of a black hole “eating” a star.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.
A slave fortress in Cape Coast, Ghana.
AP Photo/Clement N'Taye
In less than a decade, most people won’t be able to play a VHS tape anymore. Let’s farewell the humble tape, and celebrate the archives finding their way to digitisation and YouTube.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne