Chapter 1 Introduction

Context

The aim of this book is to explore the multiple interpretations, contexts and uses of ‘digital cultural heritage’. These elements will undoubtedly change over time – the concept of digital cultural heritage is still very much evolving – so this volume might best be described as a snapshot of a particular moment rather than any kind of definitive statement. Even if it necessarily delineates the present, however, we are just as much concerned with the pasts and possible futures of digital cultural heritage. The book is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing, critical discussion of what constitutes digital cultural heritage, who it is created by and for, the qualities that it shares with more traditional forms of cultural heritage (and those it does not), and what skills and values should be brought to bear when collecting, describing, displaying, exploring, analysing and preserving it. We hope that it will spark debate and conversation and bring our work into dialogue with other – perhaps contradictory – opinions and different forms of expertise and knowledge.

We are aware that there are different ‘presents’ depending on where an individual, community or institution happens to be located, and the resources and infrastructures that might be available to them. Consequently, we begin this book with a brief reflection on who we are as the authors of this book. We wish to consider, as far as we can, the experiences and assumptions that we bring to this research, and the knowledge that we both do and do not have. We have many things in common – we are all women who currently live in the United Kingdom – but have had different life and career trajectories. We come to this book from different standpoints, yet do not begin to capture all of the perspectives and skills that can be brought to bear when studying and working with digital cultural heritage. A historian of science by training, Eirini Goudarouli started her career holding research and managerial roles at the University Archives and the University Lab for the electronic processing of historical collections at the University of Athens in Greece. This early engagement with heritage collections and their digital representation, exploration and analysis led her to develop a passion for digital cultural heritage. In the UK she held various digital research roles in information-holding institutions and academia before she joined The National Archives, UK, where she is now the head of research. The current focus of her work is to drive innovation that enables the unlocking of physical, digital and born-digital collections in new ways, to broaden current understanding through ground-breaking interdisciplinary research and cross-sector collaborations. Anna-Maria Sichani is an interdisciplinary researcher, with a background in media and literary history and digital humanities. She started her international career with collaborations in crowdsourcing, digital cultural heritage projects and large-scale infrastructures in Greece, the Netherlands and the UK. Through a series of professional and community engagements, her interdisciplinary interests and expertise have come to centre on the development of sustainable knowledge infrastructures and communities of practice around open, reproducible, equitable and transparent data and software in the arts and humanities and cultural heritage. Her current work as a research associate in digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, focuses on materiality, media changes and their entanglement with the digital, and on emerging computational methods, including their ethical and responsible development, for cultural heritage and research data. Finally, after a PhD in medieval history, Jane Winters began working in small-scale scholarly publishing at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), University of London. Her first years at the IHR coincided with rapid advances in digital publishing and editing, and this led to her management of digital research and infrastructure projects like British History Online.¹ She is now professor of digital humanities in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she has a keen interest in both digital archives and infrastructure and open forms of digital publication. It is from these individual and collective vantage points that we begin to explore the complex world of digital cultural heritage.

The digital technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have had a transformative effect on research in the arts and humanities that engages with cultural heritage, and on research and practice in the cultural heritage sector. At the heart of this transformation has been the widespread digitisation of cultural heritage materials, creating machine-readable copies of text and image that can be accessed, analysed and manipulated in new ways and by new audiences (Jensen 2021; Owens and Padilla 2021). From initial experiments within Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) in the 1970s through to the mass digitisation of the 1990s and beyond, there is now an expectation that cultural heritage institutions, in the Global North at least, will ‘host a proportion of their content online, and be engaging with the production of computer interactives’ (Terras et al. 2021, 2). The consequences of this shift in modes of dissemination, access and knowledge creation remain emergent, but it is clear that ‘mass digitization presents a new political cultural memory paradigm, one in which we see strands of technical and ideological continuities combine with new ideals and opportunities’ (Thylstrup 2019, 4). The Council of Europe similarly records that ‘Digitisation is profoundly changing our cultural experience, not only in terms of new technology-based access, production and dissemination, but also in terms of participation and creation, and learning and partaking in a knowledge society’ (Council of Europe n.d., Understanding the Impact of Digitisation on Culture). In 2016, the UK Government published a Culture White Paper that set out the ambition to make ‘the UK one of the world’s leading countries for digitised public collections content. We want users to enjoy a seamless experience online, and have the chance to access particular collections in depth as well as search across all collections’ (Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2016, 39); while in March 2018, the ‘Culture Is Digital’ policy paper recognised the power of digitisation to unlock cultural assets and the importance of making them more interoperable and discoverable (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport 2018).

But this is not just a story of digitisation. Ever more of the world’s cultural heritage is born digital, with no analogue referent. Traditionally, cultural heritage assets are physical items that are tangible and defined by their material characteristics (for example, paper, textile, wax) and can be preserved based on their aesthetic and physical qualities as well as their information value. If digitisation can tend to flatten out the differences between diverse forms of cultural heritage (for example, presenting manuscripts, books and newspapers alike by sheet, page or folio image), born-digital heritage is strikingly heterogeneous and multimodal. Born-digital heritage presents a landscape of new archival objects that come in a variety of formats (for example, Microsoft Word documents, emails, high-definition video, snapshots of websites and social media pages), with little or no structure, and require the existence of increasingly complex and flexible systems and rapidly evolving technological environments (Goudarouli 2023, 268). This raises unique preservation and access challenges, as well as licensing and copyright issues (and requires high levels of technical skill from both curator and researcher). The questions posed by new digital archives and collections are adding further layers of complexity and opportunity across sectors, bringing new challenges but also suggesting commonality of method and approach. Acknowledgement of the value of this new type of cultural heritage is apparent in the establishment of dedicated web archives in national GLAM institutions, and increasingly in the form of targeted funding, for example the major award to the HERMES project by the French government in 2024 (Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche 2024).²

The digitised and the born digital are often considered separately, and research into the born digital in particular can be highly specialised. Witness the development of new sub-fields of research such as web archive studies or critical web archive research (Ben-David 2021). Researchers and cultural heritage professionals, however, increasingly work across multiple digital and analogue formats. A contemporary historian studying the last decade of the twentieth century, for example, will find themselves working with printed, digitised and born-digital newspapers. An archivist or librarian accepting the personal ‘papers’ of an author will often be faced with a complex hybrid archive, consisting of handwritten material and typescripts but also hard drives, floppy disks and even downloaded social media data. A digital preservation specialist developing, implementing, maintaining and documenting digital preservation and access workflows and policies will often find themselves taking decisions about born-digital assets (for example, software, executable code, structured datasets and records derived from machine learning systems) that may influence the evolution of the digital infrastructures and archiving systems that support them. A museum curator planning an exhibition of video games will work with games in a variety of formats, an equally diverse range of hardware and the material culture of gaming magazines, arcades and user guides. It is our argument here that we should consider the digitalisation of cultural heritage as encompassing not just the digitised and the born digital but the structures and processes within which they are embedded.

Our understandings of digital cultural heritage need to be sufficiently broad to capture this diversity, while retaining the specialist knowledge and expertise that characterise work in GLAM institutions and with their digital collections. This tension is nicely highlighted by Prescott and Wiggins (2024) in relation to one of the four pillars of GLAM, that is, archives: ‘As the boundaries of the archive continue to expand, there is a risk that the archive becomes a shorthand for all institutions of cultural memory, eliding museums, libraries, galleries, and archives under problematically unspecific and vague umbrella terms such as “cultural heritage”, despite their distinct professional, theoretical, and institutional identities’ (4). Both the digital and the analogue fall within this rather sceptical framing, even if we are only concerned here with the former. Prescott and Wiggins are right to be wary – ‘umbrella terms’ of this kind can serve to elide important differences in scope, remit and audience – but cultural heritage and its digital sibling have acquired a resonance, not least in relation to policy, that it would be unwise to ignore.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the position statements, charters and other documents that set out the priorities for supranational organisations with an interest in access to and the preservation and exploitation of cultural heritage in its many forms. For example, in 2019 the European Commission stated that:

Cultural heritage breathes a new life with digital technologies and the internet. The citizens have now unprecedented opportunities to access cultural material, while the institutions can reach out to broader audiences, engage new users and develop creative and accessible content for leisure and education. Europeana, for example, gives access to over 53 million items including image, text, sound, video and 3D material from the collections of over 3,700 libraries, archives, museums, galleries and audio-visual collections across Europe. (European Commission 2019, Europeana: Digitised Cultural Archives, with over 53 million items)

In 2021 the European Commission’s updated Digital Cultural Heritage Policy recognised that ‘Unprecedented opportunities brought by technologies, such as Data, AI, 3D and XR brings cultural heritage sites back to life … The transformation of the sector is resulting in easier online access to cultural material for everybody’ (European Commission 2021). It also proposed a common European data space for cultural heritage, with the aim of accelerating the digitisation of cultural heritage assets. The proposed data space was added to Europeana, a well-established European digital cultural platform.

Among the most significant of the position statements produced by supranational organisations is the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage, which was adopted at the thirty-second session of that body’s General Conference in October 2003 (UNESCO 2009). The first article of the Charter defines digital heritage as consisting of:

unique resources of human knowledge and expression. It embraces cultural, educational, scientific and administrative resources, as well as technical, legal, medical and other kinds of information created digitally, or converted into digital form from existing analogue resources. Where resources are ‘born digital’, there is no other format but the digital object. (UNESCO 2009, 1)

It goes on to describe what kinds of digital material fall within the scope of the definition: ‘Digital materials include texts, databases, still and moving images, audio, graphics, software and web pages, among a wide and growing range of formats. They are frequently ephemeral, and require purposeful production, maintenance and management to be retained’ (UNESCO 2009, 1). The Charter concludes by considering questions of access to digital heritage, the dangers of loss arising from the unique nature of digital materials, selection and preservation policies, and roles and responsibilities in relation to the safeguarding of digital heritage.

The role and influence of UNESCO in this sphere have been subject to critique. Fiona Cameron, for example, notes that ‘Digital cultural heritage emerges as a result of a dialogue between UNESCO and heritage professionals. Through these dialogues, and by transposing heritage concepts onto digital resources, digital data became caught up in heritage procedures enmeshed in West-centred values’ (Cameron 2021, 32). The broadness of the definitions and categories might also be challenged, but we would argue that it is in this very broadness that the value of the document lies. The digital landscape is continually evolving and it is impossible to predict the new forms of digital cultural heritage that may emerge in the next year let alone the next decade. In such an environment, over-specified policies and legal frameworks can be a hindrance to the vital work undertaken by GLAM institutions. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the differing legislation that has enabled the creation of national web archives in Europe, a key type of born-digital cultural heritage. Just within the UK, what can be collected and, importantly, how it can be accessed differs between The National Archives, UK (TNA) and the British Library (BL). At TNA, government websites have been archived since 2003 under the terms of the Public Records Act, which were sufficiently broadly drawn as to require no change to accommodate born-digital data. Large-scale web harvesting at the BL, in contrast, required an extension to Legal Deposit before it could begin a decade later in 2013 (Winters 2020). Note, too, that responsibility for collecting this particular form of digital cultural heritage lies with two very different organisations, one a library and one an archive. Clear boundaries are not always possible, or even desirable, to maintain in relation to digital cultural heritage.

The UNESCO Charter talks of ‘digital heritage’, but in this volume we will use the term ‘digital cultural heritage’, foregrounding the cultural value of the digital. This cultural value, however, is neither universal nor universally expressed: ‘The digital heritage is inherently unlimited by time, geography, culture or format. It is culture-specific, but potentially accessible to every person in the world. Minorities may speak to majorities, the individual to a global audience’ (UNESCO 2009, 3). In a similar vein, ‘heritage’ is neither a uniform nor a static concept: its meaning and significance evolve over time and vary greatly among different communities and individuals. Yet, while early critical approaches tried to detach cultural heritage and memory from being a nation-state’s instrument of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) by introducing a more dynamic, culturally rich and collective framework for the ways through which people enable links with the past (Nora 1989; Assmann 2008), (digital) cultural heritage is still inextricably linked with memory politics and the politics of identity. Perhaps Stuart Hall’s emblematic question ‘Whose Heritage?’ (Hall 1999) no longer has the same class or political connotations, but it remains of pressing importance among scholars in critical heritage studies focused on the tension between the concepts of ‘universal heritage’ and ‘national heritage’, especially in light of emerging nationalist and populist movements across the globe (Harrison, Dias and Kristiansen 2023), and even more emphatically in our networked era and in the case of digital cultural heritage. Dalbello reminds us, too, that digital cultural heritage has always existed outside the traditional sites of custodianship: ‘right from the start, digital cultural heritage was localized in cultural communities of small reach and specialization, without much concern or awareness of a broader audience or scalable meanings; the hidden away, invisible, indistinct and intimate in contrast to public, visible, articulated and official’ (Dalbello 2009, 5).

Memory and identity politics can thus explain why, although the UNESCO charter and its policies refer to a ‘common’ digital heritage and prioritise ‘its preservation for the benefit of present and future generations [as] an urgent issue of worldwide concern’, there are national variations in its application ‘on the ground’ (UNESCO 2009, 1): each country is responsible for safeguarding and preserving its own digital heritage through national cultural heritage organisations responsible for legal deposit, preservation and access to resources (Lusenet 2007; Cameron 2021). Indeed, there is no better place to trace these strong politics of identity than in national mass digitisation initiatives and the availability of corresponding funding, public or private, in cultural heritage institutions over the last twenty-five years (Terras 2022; Zaagsma 2023). At the same time, over the past decade, a series of international digital cultural heritage infrastructural repositories, such as Europeana, the Internet Archive and HathiTrust, have come to enhance national initiatives through the innovative linkage of dispersed digital cultural heritage collections (Benardou et al. 2019). These infrastructures are also linked from the outset to fragile international identities and Western-centric cultural policy agendas and come with a different set of embedded politics and biases (Thylstrup 2019; Kizhner et al. 2021; Capurro and Severo 2023).

On the other hand, ‘heritage’ is not simply frozen in time or solely connected to the past. Although cultural heritage institutions mainly preserve assets from the past that have already been assigned ‘heritage status’, in the case of digital and born-digital cultural heritage the main focus is towards what might be called ‘living heritage’ or more accurately ‘heritage-to-be’ (Lusenet 2007). This emphasis introduces a dynamic, evolving perspective on the concept of ‘heritage’. The heritagisation of the present past (Butler 2006), especially in the case of born-digital cultural content, presents a historico-curatorial oxymoron as it is through the processes of selection, curation and digital preservation of that content that it is conceptualised as ‘digital cultural heritage’. From this perspective, preservation is less about maintaining the past and more about anticipating what will be valued in the future and thus elevating contemporary born-digital cultural production to the status of ‘future heritage’.

What precisely constitutes digital cultural heritage – what characteristics it does and does not share with more traditional forms of cultural heritage – is the subject of much research and debate. Taking the UNESCO Charter as a starting point, von Schorlemer notes:

The specific characteristics of the digital heritage have led to its designation as a ‘new heritage’ in the literature. Features distinguishing it from analogue heritage include the possibility to copy digital objects an infinite number of times without a reduction in their quality … and its potential accessibility from everywhere in the world via the Internet. (Schorlemer 2020, 39)

Bonacchi and Krzyzanska have described heritage ‘as the processes and outcomes of engaging with elements of the past – material and immaterial – and attributing social and cultural meanings to them in the present’. They go on to ‘define the sub-field of digital heritage as examining interactions of this kind that are enabled by the Internet and the outcomes of such processes (the footprints – including data – that are produced)’ (Bonacchi and Krzyzanska 2019, 1237). Münster and colleagues offer a rather simpler definition – ‘digital heritage concentrates on tangible and intangible cultural heritage objects and their preservation, education and research’ – but similarly identifies (im)materiality as a key consideration (Münster et al. 2019, 813).

Cameron and Kenderdine’s important edited volume Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage addresses ‘digital cultural heritage as a political concept and practice’, taking in such questions as

the representation and interpretation of cultural heritage such as digital objects; issues of mobility and interactivity both for objects and consumers of digital heritage; the relations between communities and heritage institutions as mediated through technologies; the reshaping of social, cultural and political power in relation to cultural organizations made possible through communication technologies; and the visualization and interpretation of archaeological sites and historic environments. (Cameron and Kenderdine 2007, 2)

This approach is endorsed by McCrary (2011).

Cameron continues to adopt this expansive interpretation of digital cultural heritage but emphasises its tight connection with data: ‘Digital cultural heritage is conceived as all digital data that a society sees as important to retain and keep as a source of knowledge for future generations’. Of particular relevance for this volume, she distinguishes between two types of ‘digital cultural heritage product’: ‘digitally born, derived from data only existing in digital format, and digital surrogates (now popularly known as digitizations), or digital reproductions of pre-existing works’ (Cameron 2021, 3–4).

Although the distinction between digitised and born-digital records remains valid and meaningful today, with each contributing to the expanding notion of digital cultural heritage, it is increasingly becoming a matter of degree rather than kind, particularly as we move towards more data-driven formats and processes. In practice, digitised and born-digital materials now coexist within shared digital infrastructures, face similar data-related preservation challenges and are encountered side by side in research, public engagement and institutional workflows. At the same time, the emergence of increasingly complex born-digital forms, such as immersive media, algorithmic art and AI-generated models and outputs, is radically reshaping our understanding of what constitutes cultural heritage. Digital cultural heritage should thus be seen less as a fixed field and more as a dynamic practice in constant motion and continual redefinition, a space that embraces and accommodates the unpredictable nature of technological and cultural change.

Themes and topics

All of these questions, concerns and considerations have informed the themes and topics addressed in this co-authored volume. In the following chapters, we will focus on four core thematic areas through which to consider digital cultural heritage: access, use and reuse, value(s) and sustainability. These themes cut across the digitised and the born-digital and are central to the work of the institutions responsible for the management and dissemination of digital cultural heritage and the researchers of all kinds who work with those digital materials. To an extent, this thematic division is an artificial one, and there will be intersection and some overlap in what follows, but it is one means of navigating a shifting and sometimes challenging landscape. The use of these themes also, we hope, helps to avoid the dangers of presentism that can afflict anyone who writes about digital technologies. So rather than discussing at length Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital cultural heritage, which at the time of writing is the subject of much, often-polarised argument, we will address AI as just one aspect of use and reuse.

Turning first to questions of access, Chapter 2 will consider the influence and impact of open data in the cultural heritage sector, along with wider cultures of open knowledge and science. It will also explore the role of responsible and careful openness, which may involve limiting access to digital collections, or even closing them entirely. The ownership of digital cultural heritage will be discussed, including both activist, community and indigenous collections and the data held by the large commercial entities that are increasingly referred to and relied upon as archives. Finally, the impact of technological advances on access to digital collections will be explored.

Chapter 3, on use and reuse, tackles the thorny problem of copyright and licensing, which applies to all forms of cultural heritage but takes on a unique shape in the digital sphere. It addresses the loss of control that can occur when digital cultural heritage is placed in the public domain, in contrast to the stifling of innovation and creativity that can happen when institutions default to restrictive licensing practices. The chapter also begins to outline the skills and frameworks that enable work with digital cultural heritage, including technical expertise, but also effective documentation and ethical approaches that are both robust and adaptive. It concludes by introducing some of the tools and infrastructures that can both enable and constrain the use and reuse of digital cultural heritage.

In Chapter 4, we consider both the value of digital cultural heritage and the values that it encodes and represents. The question of value is highly relevant in relation to digital cultural heritage, as new kinds of objects and data stretch existing collecting policies and indeed infrastructures. To which forms of digital cultural heritage are value ascribed, and by whom? The chapter discusses which groups and individuals are represented in the digital materials collected by GLAMs and explores how the different forms of knowledge and contribution present in digital collections, large and small, are acknowledged and contextualised. It also considers how curators and users of digital cultural heritage can manage, and in some cases be protected from, challenging and even harmful materials.

Finally, Chapter 5 addresses the multilayered topic of preservation and sustainability. It explores practical considerations of preservation, the infrastructures needed to ensure that abundant digital cultural heritage is secured for the future, and concerns about data security and integrity. In addition to the physical infrastructures that are essential for sustainability, it examines the role of people, and particularly how communities outside GLAMs can be engaged with digital cultural heritage over the long term. Next, taking in a different facet of sustainability, it examines how cultural heritage institutions are thinking about the development of more environmentally sustainable digital preservation practices, which may ultimately lead to difficult decisions about when and what not to preserve and sustain.

In the conclusion, Chapter 6, we identify future areas for research and some of the topics and ideas that we would like to see given further consideration. These can only be suggestions rooted in a particular time and context, but we hope that they will serve as a jumping-off point for a rich and diverse debate that allows space for agreement, difference and development.

Notes

1.   British History Online, a not-for-profit digital library, was launched in 2002 with funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. It brings together primary and secondary source material for British history from the collections of libraries, archives, museums and academics. https://british-history.ac.uk [accessed 30 August 2024].

2.   HERMES, one of six major investments in the humanities and social sciences, has three main objectives: ‘structurer les capacités de recherche sur les patrimoines en devenir et développer un consortium interdisciplinaire avec une forte visibilité nationale et internationale, renforcer le transfert de la recherche vers les acteurs publics et la société, et favoriser une approche démocratique et inclusive du patrimoine culturel, en accord avec les besoins et les évolutions de la société’ (‘to structure research capabilities for heritage in the making and develop an interdisciplinary consortium with high national and international visibility, to strengthen the transfer of research to public actors and society, and to foster a democratic and inclusive approach to cultural heritage, in line with society’s needs and evolution’).