The Scent of the Digital Archive: Dilemmas with Archive Digitisation

Abstract

Archival infrastructure is changing at a rapid pace as a consequence of digitisation. The effort to digitise analogue collections seems to have benefits only for researchers. Still, only a fraction of analogue archive material is currently available in digital form. This article raises some of the problematic aspects about the practice of digitising analogue collections and their consequences for historical research. The dilemmas that confront archivists and historians are not easy to resolve: the digitisation of analogue collections is leading to two costly and co-existing infrastructures, while archival collections that are not digitised risk becoming marginalised.