During 2016, the Royal Danish Library digitized more than 200.000 pages from the library’s, collections all of which related to the former colonies in the Caribbean. This included books and other printed matter, but also sheet music, manuscripts, personal documents, photographs and drawings. Images were published in Digital Collections, the library’s platform for digitized materials, and were accompanied by limited metadata, thereby posing challenges in terms of accessibility and important historical contextualisation. This essay therefore reflects on the gaps and the silences that haunt indexing and descriptive practices in the migration online. Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer is Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Danish Library and has been project-managing the digitisation. Temi Odumosu is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Malmö University and has worked intensively with the collection as user and collaborator in the project What Lies Unspoken. As the Library embarks on initiatives to address the limited metadata associated with its digital collections, the authors come together to unfold key questions about approaches and process. They describe the characteristics of Digital Collections and the metadata currently provided, and ask what is left out and why; thereby engaging cultural biases that uneasily mirror the colonial project. The authors also explore how more inclusive user involvement, particularly in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), could shift language and epistemology. The leading inquiry question is: In the one-eyed colonial archive, what is it possible for metadata to do?

Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and Eld Zierau: Spitting Image. Press photographs and memes as digital cultural heritage in Netarkivet This article deals with the challenges that confront libraries in their efforts to collect and make available national cultural heritage to researchers in today’s hybrid media society. The authors illustrate their arguments with a case study: Sigrid Nygaard’s photograph of a man spitting down on to immigrants from its initial appearance in a Tweet of 2015 to its reproduction in the national and international and social media, a field which also includes the many memes it engendered. The authors describe how the photograph became part of a heated debate on immigration policies and media ethics and suggest different academic fields in which the material can be studied, such as political science and media studies. They investigate a selection of sources and describe how these were collected by Netarkivet as part of the library’s obligation under the Legal Deposit Act, thereby providing insights into the different methods of finding and collecting material from the internet. Finally they argue that commonly known referencing practices are insufficient when it comes to web archive materials in general and point to a newly emerging referencing practice using so-called Persistent Web IDentifiers (PWID), which enable researchers to create precise and persistent references to web archive resources. The research was carried out to ensure that such materials would be saved and would continue to be available to researchers, to investigate and contribute to new collection methods, to cite digital cultural heritage, and to inform researchers about Netarkivet’s resources and ways in which one can work academically with the materials the archive contains.

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Tale ved åbning af udstillingen 18. maj 2017

Kollokvium om at udstille kunst og naturvidenskab. Steno Museet, Danmarks Videnskabshistoriske Museum, Århus, 25. september 2006. In the fall of 2006, the Steno Museum (Aarhus, Denmark) exhibited the installation Room One created by the American artist Rosamond Purcell. This installation consists of a full-size model of Museum Wormianum, the Danish physician Ole Worm’s curiosity cabinet, dating from the 17th century. This is a work of art – yet it depicts a naturalist’s laboratory. When one adds that it has also been called the first museum in Denmark, it seemed an obvious step to make the artwork the occasion of a symposium on the relationship between art, science and museums. At this symposium, the artist, along with a number of science historians and museum curators, discussed the definitions of art and science then and now, and spoke about the attempts to transcend the disciplinary boundaries that take place within the museums. Different ways of exhibiting were brought into focus, and Purcell’s installation formed the basis for many interesting discussions about the museum as a place of learning and of aesthetic experience.