The digital transformation of our society has an enormous impact on the nature and form of information. Art too, is increasingly taking on non-tangible forms. The preservation of art is a major challenge for art and heritage organizations today.
The Flanders Architecture Institute hosts in collaboration with CEMPER, Letterenhuis, M HKA/CKV, FARO and meemoo, a series of webinars where questions about technological, practical and ethical issues are addressed.
In this series of four online lectures, spread over the autumn of 2021 and the spring of 2022, four international leading experts will be given the floor about the archive of the future.
Questions that are central:
For whom?
For everyone from the (international) cultural heritage field for whom managing and documenting (arts) heritage is a challenge and a task, or is interested in this theme.
With: Alexandra Eveleigh, Collections Information Manager van Wellcome Collection in Londen.
Program:
The interactive technologies of the ‘social web’ or Web 2.0 have given rise to a participatory online culture. Archival institutions have embraced these new technologies with enthusiasm, aiming to engage users and expand digital access to collections. This has resulted in initiatives ranging from crowdsourced transcription, tagging, annotation and commenting, through to social (media) collecting, shared appraisal, and fully reciprocal models of curation. Individuals and communities are often motivated to contribute their time and labour to archives, but in return they expect their experience and their contributions to be recognised and valued.
User expectations of digitisation and the need for online access to archives have only increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many archives responded by launching new participation opportunities. Online participation may help engage new supporters of the archive, but it does not address issues of longer-term sustainability for the (physical or digital) archives.
Dr. Alexandra Eveleigh is Collections Information Manager at Wellcome Collection in London, where she leads a multidisciplinary team of archivists, librarians and museum professionals, and her role complements her research interests in user experiences and digital technologies in cultural heritage contexts. Her professional practice background spans university special collections, local government, the charity sector, and The [U.K.] National Archives (TNA). From 2014 to 2016 she held academic positions in information studies and digital humanities at University College London (UCL) and the University of Westminster respectively, following her PhD work on online participatory archives in collaboration with TNA. Alexandra is also a 2008 Winston Churchill Fellow in connection to her work on born-digital archives.
Read the webinar Q&A reportFriday 11 February 2022, 15.00 – 16.30 | Who determines the value of archives? A feminist approach. With: Michelle Caswell, Associate Professor of Archival Studies, Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). More info here.
11.02.2022
from 3 pm until 4.30 pm
online lecture, via Zoom
English
for free
The webinars in the spring of 2022 will address the topics of 'representativeness' and 'digital preservation'. More information will follow soon.
