Abstract
Through documenting, preserving, and making local heritage accessible, digital cataloguing offers community archives significant potential benefits. But undertaking digital cataloguing in this context is not without challenges. Community archives depend on intermittent funding, have restricted access to digital connectivity and devices, and rely on elderly volunteers who often lack the digital skills required. Following Thomas and colleagues’ digital inclusion framework, which considers the capacity for accessing, affording, and having the digital abilities to ‘use online technologies effectively’ (Thomas J, Barraket J, Wilson C K, Holcombe-James I, Kennedy J, Rennie E, Ewing S, MacDonald T (2020) Measuring Australia’s digital divide: the Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. RMIT and Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, for Telstra, p 8), community archives can be considered digitally excluded. Through an ethnographic study of one community archive’s use of Victorian Collections, an Australian digital cataloguing platform, this article examines the impact of digital exclusion on digital cataloguing outcomes via metrics of quantity and quality. These indicate limited cataloguing outcomes, with community collections obscured, rather than revealed. But these metrics disregard the opportunities for enhancing individual and archival digital inclusion that learning how, and continuing, to digitally catalogue present. By tracing one elderly volunteer’s journey from digitally excluded non-user to capable cataloguer, I show how digital cataloguing offered an opportunity for enhancing this individual’s digital inclusion, simultaneously improving that of the archive. In considering these unintended opportunities, this article contributes to our understanding of how digital exclusion impacts the digitisation of cultural heritage, and offers scope for determining how the process and practice of digital cataloguing itself can present opportunities for inclusion at the individual and archival level.
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Notes
The Returned & Services League of Australia was established in the wake of World War One to unify support provision for service people and their families. Sub-Branch’s (such as Lara’s) sit under the national umbrella and serve their local area. The Lara RSL Sub-Branch was formed in 1928 and has occupied the same mid-nineteenth century building since their first official meeting on April 11, 1949. As community archives, RSL Sub-Branch’s collect and preserve local military history. The Lara Sub-Branch holds approximately 900 collection items.
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This research was supported through the provision of both an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and an RMIT Engaging Capability Platform Social Change Scholarship.
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The sole author was responsible for study conception and design. The sole author was responsible for material preparation, data collection, and analysis. The sole author was responsible for drafting and revising the submitted manuscript.
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In accordance with my ethical obligation as a researcher, I am reporting that I am presently a Research Fellow on the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al., 2020), upon whose digital inclusion framework of Access, Affordability and Digital Ability framework this article draws. While the Australian Digital Inclusion Index is funded by Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunication provider, the research reported on in the enclosed paper falls outside of this work both conceptually and temporally and was not. This article is an expanded and reworked version of the authors doctoral research, see Holcombe-James (2019).
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Holcombe-James, I. ‘I’m fired up now!’: digital cataloguing, community archives, and unintended opportunities for individual and archival digital inclusion. Arch Sci 22, 521–538 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-021-09380-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-021-09380-1