Was all the promise of digitization of cultural heritage false hope?

 When I did my masters in ALM during the 2010’s a very outspoken perspective was that digitisation eventually would solve a lot of heritage issues. Even though for instance born digital documents would come with certain challenges such as the format becoming obsolete, digital services were deemed as the future. Almost ten years later I think a lot about the results of this change.

Starting with the obvious it is clear that digitization to some extent have saved important historical documents from the risk of pershising. We can for instance see how many medieval documents have been scanned in ways that not only saves the information but also the context in the form of margins, tearings etcetera. On the other hand we can also see how other objectives are far from succeeding.

A rather clear example is that we only partly have digitised entire archives. Instead the tendency is that only some records, in some cases even only some individual records have been digitised. Thereby it is only part of a collection that often is accessible, rendering the documents more or less useless for research. I personally believe that we actually should speak more of digital collections rather than digital archives. 

Another ”failed promise” is when original visions collided with reality. I was perhaps naive but also one of many when I envisioned a future where we would have perhaps only two or three large collections of digitised material in Sweden. Within these collections vast amount of documents would exist. Instead we can see how many institutions have chosen to develop their own platforms, even though some actors share. Perhaps this is also a limitation, to many website will make access harder. Still it is also hard to practically do it any other way given for instance copyright and institutional frameworks.

What then can be said on the digitization of archives? Have the utopian ideas of an all encompassing easy to navigate collection falled short? My personal belief is that we will eventually get there. But just like in the childhood of internet we will have to endure a period of trial and error. 

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