Human Perspectives and Social Infrastructures: Prioritising People in GLAM Digitisation

Abstract

Much discussion in current digital humanities research and funding is concerned with creating, using and maintaining technical and research infrastructures. These large-scale projects are often ambitious – designed to bring tools, data and researchers together to pool resources, work across silos, leverage regional competencies and avoid duplication of effort. Technologies such as the semantic web and linked data are deployed to collate diverse collections into cross-institutional platforms. National and supra-national bodies earmark funds to develop portals enabling access to aggregated digital heritage, and shared data spaces. This consolidation is often driven by calls for broader access to materials, wider accountability from holding institutions to a range of different publics, and the need for reproducibility – particularly for publicly funded projects and institutions. This is paired with increased demand for more quantified metrics and approaches within heritage digitisation. The massive volume of material coming online every year is not always easy to find, maintain or use. Based on our individual (and shared) experiences of working in an academic library, a national museum and a university digital humanities group, we argue that it is essential to consider the public as a network, as we would in terms of infrastructure. It is this network which should drive thinking on how digitisation is done, and how infrastructures are developed. We argue that modern information organisation standards are not necessarily human oriented, and that we must take consideration and care to ensure that social infrastructures are not overlooked in these contexts. The FAIR and CARE principles are not always easy to apply to massive collections of (often heterogenous) materials, and additional guidelines and best-practice approaches need to be developed, if we want to allow the users of digital collections to experience the transformative moments in collections.

Keywords

• museums
• libraries
• digital humanities
• digital infrastructure
• digital collections