Blank pages, brief notes and ethical double-binds: micro digitisation and the ‘infinite archive’

Abstract

As Maryanne Dever has noted, 'there is no question that digitisation is rapidly changing the ways in which archives are made and the forms in which archival documents are organised, distributed and used' . 1 Among these changes is that new technologies allow public participation in the creation of digital content. As observed during a mass digitisation project that involved public contribution of over 42,000 documents, a problem with this is that members of the public may be inexpert at judging the integrity of the information they are providing. 2 Looking across disciplinary borders into changes for academic historians in the digital age, much has been written on how digital technologies have transfigured the preservation of records, access to records and the dissemination of research. A documented consequence of the abundance of digital archives and scholarly databases is the problem of an 'infinite archive' . 3 That is, how to create historical knowledge amid a seemingly inexhaustible supply of digitally-discoverable primary (time of origin; often archival) and secondary (scholarship) sources that are no longer delimited spatially or temporally, as were traditional sources less than a generation ago. An unexplored transdisciplinary issue for archivists and historians

Community engagement, cultural competence and two Australian public libraries and Indigenous communities

“…Generalizability, a weakness of autoethnography (McIntyre, 2016; Mendez, 2013), is enabled by description of the writer’s experience and analysis of underlying trends and issues, sufficient to enable other researchers or practitioners to consider and compare their own experience with the writer’s and with the theory used by the writer. Dispute or agreement with the writer’s findings follows.…”