Participatory Archives: Theory and Practice

The internet as a platform for facilitating human organization without the need for organizations has, through social media, created new challenges for cultural heritage institutions. Challenges include but are not limited to: how to manage copyright, ownership, orphan works, open data access to heritage representations and artifacts, crowdsourcing, cultural heritage amateurs, information as a commodity or information as public domain, sustainable preservation, attitudes towards openness and much more.

Participatory Heritage uses a selection of international case studies to explore these issues and demonstrates that in order for personal and community-based documentation and artifacts to be preserved and included in social and collective histories, individuals and community groups need the technical and knowledge infrastructures of support that formal cultural institutions can provide. In other words, both groups need each other.

Divided into three core sections, this book explores

• participants in the preservation of cultural heritage, exploring heritage institutions and organizations, community archives, and groups;
• challenges, including discussion of giving voices to communities, social inequality, digital archives, and data and online sharing; and
• solutions, discussing open access and APIs, digital postcards, the case for collaboration, digital storytelling and co-designing heritage practice.