Series editors’ preface

The Digital Cultural Heritage series is a forum for exploring the past, present and future of digital cultural heritage, both digitised and born-digital. This transdisciplinary, open access series of short-form books interrogates digital cultural heritage in all its forms, focusing on the key themes of use, access, value(s) and ephemerality. It considers histories of digitisation; the unequal and uneven heritagisation of new forms of cultural data; how individuals and institutions can adapt their practice and processes to exploit digital cultural heritage effectively; how digital cultural heritage is communicated to wider publics; skills for working with digital archives and collections; the politics and economics of digitisation; the values encoded in the digitised and born-digital; and how digital cultural heritage is embedded in teaching and learning practice.

One motivation for writing this volume has been to highlight some of the topics and ideas that we would like to see explored through future publications in the Digital Cultural Heritage series that this book initiates. It sketches out concepts and approaches that we hope will provide inspiration for formulating, discussing, challenging and rethinking a rapidly developing field of research and practice.

As editors of the series, we are most keen to hear in due course from authors and contributors working in geographical or thematic areas beyond our direct expertise and on the subjects and approaches that will shape studies in digital cultural heritage in the coming decades. For example, the majority of the initiatives and projects on which we draw in this book reflect the situation in the UK, drawing secondarily on European contexts. We acknowledge this focus on the Global North, which itself reflects an uneven and inequitable division of international resourcing and attention. To take a thematic example, we have not engaged in depth with the aesthetic and experiential dimensions of accessing digital cultural heritage, which are of such relevance for digital museology. There will inevitably be many other gaps and omissions.

The framing of the series is deliberately wide, concerned with digital cultural heritage wherever it may be located and by whomever it may be created. We hope that this book will be the beginning of a rich, diverse and informative debate that allows space for agreement, difference and development.

Eirini Goudarouli, Anna-Maria Sichani and Jane Winters