The importance of digitisation in accessing archival materials
Elizabeth Lhost, Program Manager of the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) presented the Margaret Anstee Centre’s first event of the Michaelmas Term on 17 October, with a training session on the digitisation of archival materials. Her talk focused on how digital technology has changed the nature of research, how it has expanded the resources available to researchers and she also outlined MEAP’s approach to supporting this work.
Background to the digitisation of archival materials
In The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age, Ian Milligan explains how digital abundance has radically changed the way researchers approach archival work, with online searches and digital databases often being the first port of call. However there can be restrictions on what these searches reveal, this may depend on a researcher’s institutional level of access, the search terms used, language of the materials being looked for (see the State of the Internet’s Languages report), and the algorithms at work – which may all skew the results of a digital search.
Despite high levels of internet usage in most countries of the world, the production of web content is highly concentrated in areas such as Europe, and not all languages are represented online, with English being very dominant. Another issue is that though data may be available, it needs to be transformed to be searchable, for example in creating digital versions of script and digital descriptions that aid the researcher when searching.
The digitisation of libraries by Google Books (as analysed in Along Came Google and Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria) has also been problematic, too focused on books in the English language, with gaps caused by copyright issues and the exclusion of formats which are more difficult or costly to digitalise. This has perpetuated many of the inequalities in accessing texts and knowledge from non-English histories.
Digitising primary sources is an important priority, for example by AM, and technology has a key role to play. This is something that organisations such as East View Information Services are attempting to tackle through the digitisation of more diverse materials such as those created in Arabic script. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology is a useful technology for archival digitisation, which is very accurate in English but less useful in other languages. HTR (handwritten text recognition) with the Transkribus tool can also be helpful. The aim is to increase access to more parts of human history.
The Modern Endangered Archives Program
The MEAP, which is based at UCLA Library, provides grants aimed at securing the safety of the most vulnerable and important archival collections from around the world (outside of the US, Canada and Europe). The MEAP is concerned with archives from the 20th and 21st centuries and so as well as seeking to digitise documents, much of their funding and expertise goes towards digitising photographs and films as well as digital items that have been created in unsustainable formats. Their work aims to address some of the challenges which are described in this talk.
The program supports the digitisation of global cultural heritage at risk of loss, this may be due to environmental factors, political uncertainty or the fragility of the materials. The program is Open Access and currently contains 52 collections from 29 countries, containing over 110,000 objects. The program runs three types of grant: planning (to survey a collection), project (to digitise a collection) and regional (to digitise multiple collections).
They prioritise projects using factors such as level of endangerment, age of materials, value of content, geographic focus and the format of the collection. When assessing applications they need to see why the collection is important and interesting, that the project is community-led, that the budget is fair and reasonable and that the project is feasible and fundable.
MEAP has significant expertise to grapple with the common challenges of working with modern archives, such as around copyright, articles relating to living persons, availability of digital storage and fragility of materials. They are also conscious of current and future risks to digital security, such as hacking, digital sovereignty, power supply and the use of AI.
The MEAP is a sister program to the EAP, based at the British Library, which focuses on pre-20th century collections. Both programs are funded by Arcadia. Elizabeth Lhost is a historian who works with archival collections from around the world to support their digitisation through her work at UCLA Library.
Photo: My Hang Thi Bui, Mezna Qato, Elizabeth Lhost, Diala Lteif.