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- Convenor:
-
Rawan Alfuraih
(The University of Oxford)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Room M208, Teaching & Learning Building (TLB)
- Sessions:
- Thursday 10 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the transformative role of libraries in the digital age, focusing on how they preserve and provide access to cultural heritage. Discussions will cover digital tools, ethical considerations, and the anthropological impact of making cultural resources globally accessible.
Long Abstract:
This panel, "Anthropology in the Digital Age: The Role of Libraries in Preserving and Providing Access to Cultural Heritage," delves into the evolving function of libraries as custodians of cultural heritage in the digital era. As digital technologies transform how information is stored, shared, and accessed, libraries are at the forefront of these changes, using innovative tools to digitize, catalog, and disseminate cultural resources. This panel will explore the strategies libraries employ to preserve diverse cultural artifacts, ensuring their longevity and accessibility for future generations.
Key topics include the technological advancements that facilitate digital preservation, such as high-resolution scanning, metadata creation, and online archiving platforms. The panel also seek papers that address the ethical considerations inherent in digitizing cultural materials, particularly regarding the ownership, consent, and representation of indigenous and marginalized communities.
Researchers from anthropology, library science, and digital humanities will be sought to share case studies demonstrating successful collaborations between libraries and cultural institutions. These examples will highlight the role of libraries in making cultural heritage accessible to a global audience while respecting and preserving the context and significance of these materials.
The presentations will emphasize the anthropological implications of this digital shift, exploring how the increased accessibility of cultural resources influences contemporary cultural practices, identity formation, and intercultural dialogue. Attendees will gain insights into best practices for digital preservation and the critical role libraries play in maintaining and democratizing access to the world's cultural heritage.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 10 April, 2025, -Paper Short Abstract:
Our talk will focus on the handling of materials from colonial contexts, in particular the processes surrounding digitisation and cataloguing within libraries. We want to present the work of the Network Colonial Contexts, its activities in relation to libraries and the associated metadata work.
Paper Abstract:
The Network Colonial Contexts deals with questions of digital consolidation, processing and visibility of ‘Colonial collections’. These involve writings, finding aids, historical sources from the colonial era and coeval research materials preserved in libraries. How can such heterogeneous data from colonial contexts be digitally presented, processed, visualised, be brought together, and finally used in meaningful ways? In addition to the importance of transparency and access, co-operation with the communities of interest plays a decisive role, which must be further strengthened.
Online catalogues and exhibitions form an interface between knowledge collections in European libraries on the one hand and the global public on the other. While this makes collections more accessible worldwide, this process is also accompanied by specific (ethical) challenges due to a larger circle of users: Who decides what can be shown and how? Which labels are used? Which standardised terms e.g. for forms of acquisition (exchange, gift, purchase, robbery) are appropriate? And who decides on all this? Another issue in this context includes multilingualism and multi-literacy as well.
Terminology and metadata are becoming increasingly important in the context of growing discourses on decolonisation as well when working on online catalogues and databases. They create transparency, enable participation and form the basis for the negotiations of communities of interest on forms of representation or restitution of certain objects. They are therefore no longer merely a working tool, but an important component of decolonial practice. The search for suitable and/or standardised concepts and systems of order poses a particular challenge.
Paper Short Abstract:
Social media, a site and form of cultural heritage, poses challenges for museums. This paper explores how the Museum of London collects, conserves and curates social media, analysing its dual role as a cultural artefact and a tool that can democratise and open up museum collecting and access.
Paper Abstract:
Social media is increasingly part of cultural expression, heritage and the formation of social worlds. People use social media for socialising, activism, political campaigning and information sharing. As such, museums and cultural organisations are beginning to experiment with collecting social media as a museum object and preserving this emergent type of object. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the curatorial team at the Museum of London (MoL), this paper looks at the process of collecting, curating and displaying social media as a born-digital object in the MoL’s collection. I break down the process of selecting whose voices to include when collecting social media, how to conserve this new and volatile form of object, and finally, the often contradictory responses that visitors had to seeing social media presented as cultural heritage in the MoL’s displays. I explore how social media is viewed as a “difficult” object that challenges the public’s understanding of cultural heritage, as well as challenging existing museum collection procedures, particularly focusing on how social media does not align with the Museum’s current collections management software. I show that the Museum treats social media as both an object (for example, collecting a single tweet) and as a collecting tool that democratises the voices of the collection (for example, collecting every tweet using a particular hashtag). This dual function adds to anthropological understandings of social media as both a social and a material form.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper examines ethical hesitations in digitally archiving fieldwork recordings collected in Saudi Arabia, advocating for context-specific methods across research stages. As a local anthropologist, I explore tribalism, gender roles, and the challenges of consent and contextualisation for reuse.
Paper Abstract:
This paper explores innovative, dynamic, sustainable, and contextual methodological approaches to the ethical digital archiving of audio recordings from doctoral fieldwork in Saudi Arabia. As open science increasingly prioritises data reproducibility over publications, whose theoretical frameworks may lose relevance over time, archiving becomes central to folkloric studies and oral histories. Yet, while some anthropologists overlook archiving in their practice, others face significant ethical hesitations. Much of this hesitation arises from treating archiving as an afterthought, addressed only at the conclusion of a research project. To foster a broader research impact within the social sciences and shift prevailing attitudes towards archiving, this paper argues for integrating archiving into every stage of the research lifecycle, moving beyond ethical approvals and consent.
As a local Saudi anthropologist conducting audio interviews with elder relatives about life before the transformative changes of the early twentieth century, my work responds to the scarcity of ethnographic knowledge on the region and the ongoing loss of earlier research data. Despite my preservation motivates, I critically address ethical hesitations around archiving, engaging with Saudi-specific dilemmas and the broader legacies of archival practices. Rejecting rigid, universal guidelines, I explore research designs sensitive to local contexts, focusing on persistently impactful aspects such as tribalism and gender roles. My approach also examines wider ethical and epistemological concerns, aiming to balance research impact with respect for community agency. This includes providing adequate context for secondary use, seeking informed consent, conducting sensitivity checks, and navigating the politics of ‘the right to be forgotten.’