Abstract for The Permissive Archive conference, 9 November 2012, London, England.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
The proliferation of digitised historical resources comes with a caveat. Scholars working with digitised materials are careful to point out that while digitised versions of archival materials are a blessing in providing easy access to original sources and in allowing the easy comparison of artefacts stored in different repositories, there is no replacement for the real thing. The materiality of historical books and manuscripts only comes across when inspecting their physical copies.
This point is equally true for archives. Digital resources such as State Papers Online and The Cecil Papers give access to virtually the entire corpus of State Papers of Early Modern England. Yet archival scholars well know that using these digital surrogates may be a delight, but in doing so one will miss many fruits of archival research, such as insights into provenance and context brought on by seeing the artefacts in their current physical surroundings, and serendipitous discovery of unexpected items or texts.
In this paper, I will address various aspects of working with digital archives. First, I will consider types of "digital archives" we work with, and how using these digital resources changes our understanding of what exactly is an archive. Recent studies suggest that students increasingly prefer digitised over physical sources: how does this affect research ultimately based on archival material? Second, I will discuss how digital archives offer no easy solution for scholars, especially to those working on subjects that are hard to find in the original sources. Theoretically, accurate metadata, full-text transcriptions and contextual tags are the solution, but in fact these bring further challenges and problems of their own. Finally, I will briefly look at ways in which these challenges have been tackled by various projects, and reflect on the solutions provided and their effect on (digital) archival research.