Bilder för alla? : En studie i hur ABM-institutioner digitaliserar sina äldre fotografiska samlingar

The purpose of my thesis is to study how different cultural heritage institutions digitize their historical picture collections. Many of these collections contain thousands or even hundreds of thousands of photos and it can be a great strain on any institution´s resources to digitize them. I wanted to see if they use any kind of standard and if not - would a national standard be a help or a hindrance? Also I wondered what principles were behind the selection of photos chosen for digitizing and for what users it was done. I interviewed informants from a library, a museum and an archive about their reasons to digitize their photographic collections. All of them claimed that the main reason for this task was to make the photographs available. However, they didn´t seem to have planned for whom they were making the photos available or even have formulated criteria for what photos to include. Theoretically I leaned on Terry Cook´s essay about how archival science has shifted through four phases or paradigms. We have now entered the fourth paradigm, where archives are digital community archives and the archivist has been transformed to community facilitator. I consider that the meaning of this is that archives ought to be available on the Internet and that the archivist´s role is to help citizens to use the archives and to contribute to them. After studying the three institutions, I came to the conclusion that even though the photographic collections are now published on the net, they cannot be said to be easily available as they are hard to find for the average user. Furthermore, I found there is a discrepancy between the key words used by the institutions and the users, thereby making the collections even more inaccessible

A study into the effect of digitisation projects on the management and stability of historic photograph collections.

This paper reports a study into how digitisation projects have effected collections of historical photographs, and concludes that the short term project based nature of many digitisation projects has been detrimental in several ways. This work is novel (particularly in the digital library field) in that it eschews emphasis on technology to instead look at the values in the information resources themselves and how digitisation impacts on those values. It is also original in the digital library field in that it looks back at the impact of completed projects rather than describing current projects

A study into the effect of digitisation projects on the management and stability of historic photograph collections.

This paper reports a study into how digitisation projects have effected collections of historical photographs, and concludes that the short term project based nature of many digitisation projects has been detrimental in several ways. This work is novel (particularly in the digital library field) in that it eschews emphasis on technology to instead look at the values in the information resources themselves and how digitisation impacts on those values. It is also original in the digital library field in that it looks back at the impact of completed projects rather than describing current projects

Being objective: communities of practice and the use of cultural artefacts in digital learning environments

Over the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of digital content created from museum, library and archive collections but research on how this material is actually used, particularly in digital learning environments, has fallen far behind the rate of supply. In order to address this gap, this thesis examines how communities of practice (CoPs) involved in the supply and use of digital artefacts in the Higher Education sector in the UK interact with content and what factors affect this process. It focuses on a case study involving the digitisation of Shakespeare collections used in postgraduate research, and the testing of use in a range of different learning environments. This produced a number of significant findings with implications for the HE and cultural sectors. Firstly, similar patterns of artefact use were found across all users suggesting there are generic ways in which everyone interacts with digital artefacts. However, distinct forms of use did emerge which correspond with membership of particular communities of practice. Secondly, members of a CoP appear to share a particular learning style and this is influenced by the learning environment. Finally, the research indicates that a mixed method for analysing and measuring use, piloted and tested in the case study, is possible