Geographic Representation of Cultural Identity in Digital Projects and Digital Preservation

Digital projects and preservation require a variety of high-level skill sets, a lot of continuing education, and much expensive equipment. If an archive's job is to preserve and provide access to content donated by the public, to maintain that content because it is a snapshot in time of a particular cultural identity, and to provide access to as wide an audience as possible, digitization of an archive's contents makes good sense. An isolated archive that is a hub of a region can hold artifacts from towns and individuals for surrounding miles; unfortunately, it does not necessarily also hold the skill set, the budget, or the recognition of a need for education.

In cases where an archive is isolated, there are a few possibilities that can prevent under-representation of an isolated region's cultural identity:

(I don't include the care-taking approach here because that is the best way for an archive to become under-represented in the digital age.)

-Collaboration: Pooling all resources is probably the smartest way to prevent under-representation of a cultural identity. Collaboration between larger and smaller institutions are cheap, fast, and easy ways to get funding, talent, and publicity.

-New Skills Training: An organization can actively pursue good, inexpensive training from various places, and a retrenching of skills combined with new technological knowledge fosters recognition that a wider world--and a resultant future--exist along with a need that one's collection should be recognized in that wider world.

-Intra-institution skill harvesting: I just attended a digital preservation workshop, and Nancy McGovern, one of the educators, suggested that institutions seek skills by posting skill set needs on an intranet and that this could result in surprising developments.

-Speak to the public: If the public built the archive through donations, educating local populace about the need for publicity of a collection could result in local contribution of the needs of a facility.

These are just a few potential solutions that I'm kicking around, but as I look at them, I see that they all involve some form of collaboration or another. In this economy, a denial of a need for collaboration borders on stupidity at the individual level, and on gross negligence when one considers that the eye-on-the-prize goal is representing and preserving a culture's identity to the greatest extent. Archives in isolated regions might not realize how isolated they are until they try to reach out but don't have the abilities to do so.

I often hear people complain about how the East and West Coasts and big cities are the only places where television shows are set; I think it's a scary prospect to consider 20 years into the future to imagine what will be represented (based on current, good digital preservation planning)--and the holes left by cultures that would have been under-represented. If isolated institutions isolate themselves further through adamant refusal not to collaborate or assign appropriate resources and skills now, history teachers in 20 years might have trouble showing electronic versions of hand-drawn maps of those regions from 150 years prior to that.