"’As We May Digitize’—Institutions and Documents Reconfigured"

Mats Dahlström, Joacim Hansson, and Ulrika Kjellman have published "'As We May Digitize'—Institutions and Documents Reconfigured" in the latest issue of LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This article frames digitization as a knowledge organization practice in libraries and museums. The primarily discriminatory practices of museums are compared with the non-discriminatory practices of libraries when managing their respective cultural heritage collections. . . . Two poles along a digitization strategy scale, mass digitization and critical digitization, are distinguished in the article. As memory institutions are redefined in their development of digitized document collections, e.g., by increasingly emphasizing a common trans-national rather than national cultural heritage, mass digitization and critical digitization represent alternative avenues. . . . The article re-contextualizes current digitization discourse: a) historically, by suggesting that digitization brings ancient practices back to life rather than invents entirely new ones from scratch; b) conceptually, by presenting a new label (critical digitization) for a digitization strategy that has hitherto been downplayed in digitization discourse; and c) theoretically, by exploring the relations between the values of different digitization strategies, the reconfiguration of collections as they are digitized, and the redefinition of MLA institutions through those processes.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |