Abstract
A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to archives. These questions are increasingly being asked of digital archives, too. Here, we examine the complex interplay of institutional, intellectual, economic, technical, practical and social factors that have shaped decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of digitised newspapers in and from online archives. We do so by undertaking and analysing a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with public and private providers of major newspaper digitisation programmes. Our findings contribute to emerging understandings of factors that are rarely foregrounded or highlighted, yet fundamentally shape the depth and scope of digital cultural heritage archives and thus the questions that can be asked of them, now and in the future. Moreover, we draw attention to providers’ emphasis on meeting the needs of their end-users and how this is shaping the form and function of digital archives. The end user is not often emphasised in the wider literature on archival studies and we thus draw attention to the potential merit of this vector in future studies of digital archives.
Highlights
In this article we examine the selection choices that have underpinned and shaped an exemplary sample of public, private and public-private, large-scale newspaper digitisation projects
This article explores the following research questions: Which processes, circumstances and motivations have influenced decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of historic newspapers in digital archives? How have providers identified the needs of their end-users, and how are they using such understandings to shape the form, affordance and function of their digital archives? How do providers reflect on the implications of their selection choices and the digital archives they have created?
We mine a series of semi-structured interviews that we conducted with librarians, archivists and digital content managers in public institutions and commercial companies based in Australia, the Netherlands, UK and USA
Summary
In this article we examine the selection choices that have underpinned and shaped an exemplary sample of public, private and public-private, large-scale newspaper digitisation projects. Fields like critical data science, digital humanities and information science are raising important questions about the benefits and dangers of user tracking and analytics, for example, of the ethical dimensions of using the increasingly fine-grained profiles of individuals that can be derived from the aggregation and mining of the numerous separate datasets that are generated as a result of the multiplicity of ways that individuals and groups are tracked while using digital platforms (see O’Neil 2017) The interface between this literature and that of studies such as ours, which draw attention to the role of user analytics in digital cultural heritage projects, is potentially a rich and important one. We propose that this innovative aspect of our study may open interesting perspectives for future studies of digital archives, while opening new conversations about the intersection of digital cultural heritage archives and the quantification of the individual and society
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