{"id":1042,"date":"2017-05-12T12:09:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T12:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/?post_type=news&p=1042"},"modified":"2025-05-07T11:58:48","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T09:58:48","slug":"a-digital-turn-on-the-future-of-archives","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/news\/a-digital-turn-on-the-future-of-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"A digital turn? On the future of archives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When the first ForumZ with the topic Archives for the digital era, organised by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C\u00b2DH), took place on 11 February, many interested people found their way to the Casino \u2013 Forum d\u2019art contemporain in Luxembourg City on that Saturday morning. Thanks to the hashtags #ForumZLu and #archivesforthefuture, they could also actively participate in the debates over the Twittersphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The invited guests, Andreas Fickers (C2<\/sup>DH), Jos\u00e9e Kirps (National Archives of Luxembourg), Jean-Marie Ottel\u00e9 (industrie.lu<\/a>) and Jo\u00eblle Weis (University of Luxembourg), discussed about the future of the archives, as well as about the challenges and opportunities of digitisation. The conference was moderated by Pia Oppel from the radio 100,7. A podcast (in Luxembourgish) with a commentary and some excerpts of the discussion can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the digitisation is a process that cannot be stopped and even less reversed. Historians are more and more confronted with digital sources. Though digitiation offers the advantage of making large amounts of written and audiovisual sources available to the public, it needs to take place in the right framework with the right tools and the necessary skills to use them. Numerous web pages and digital archives already exist, such as the well-known crowdsourcing platform Europeana<\/a>, or the project eLuxemburgensia<\/a> of the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de Luxembourg (BNL). However, the digitisation is also slowed down by numerous problems and conflicting laws, such as the one about data protection. Moreover, documents without the necessary metadata aren\u2019t of any use to the historians, and a digitised source loses its \u2018materiality\u2019 when changing its state from analogue to digital, though this is different for digital born documents. In both cases, nevertheless, remains the question of how to preserve and archive them and what legal framework is needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These questions \u2013 and much more \u2013 were at the heart of the debate that took place in the Casino Luxembourg<\/em>. It is not my aim here to summarize all that has been said (which also risks not to do justice to every intervention that has been made), but I would like to give some thoughts based on the questions and issues that were raised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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