Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the extent to which small digitisation projects can change the historian's craft as well as the production of academic knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Many historians (and I am one of them) feel more and more the urge to do more with the documents they collect during their research. We can now publish online and make numerous sources available to our readers in the same way that scientists publish their data. After all, isn’t it the founding principle of science? Discrete projects such as 'Open Source Guinea' (Enrique Martino), the Islam Burkina Faso Collection (Frédérick Madore) or Naija Archives (IFRA-Nigeria) can now be undertaken rather easily. Unlike larger digitisation programmes such as the Endangered Archives Programme (British Library) or the Modern Endangered Archives Program (UCLA), these projects are specifically tailored to the needs of one scholarly project, that of one researcher or one relatively small team of scholars. The publication of these sources online often means that historians learn (too?) rapidly to become archivists and metadata specialists. What is the impact of this phenomenon on digital documents? Does it change the nature of our craft as historians? More importantly, to what extent is academic knowledge impacted by this new trend?