‘I’m fired up now!’: digital cataloguing, community archives, and unintended opportunities for individual and archival digital inclusion

Abstract

Through documenting, preserving, and making local heritage accessible, digital cataloguing offers community archives significant potential benefits. But undertaking digital cataloguing in this context is not without challenges. Community archives depend on intermittent funding, have restricted access to digital connectivity and devices, and rely on elderly volunteers who often lack the digital skills required. Following Thomas and colleagues’ digital inclusion framework, which considers the capacity for accessing, affording, and having the digital abilities to ‘use online technologies effectively’ (Thomas J, Barraket J, Wilson C K, Holcombe-James I, Kennedy J, Rennie E, Ewing S, MacDonald T (2020) Measuring Australia’s digital divide: the Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. RMIT and Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, for Telstra, p 8), community archives can be considered digitally excluded. Through an ethnographic study of one community archive’s use of Victorian Collections, an Australian digital cataloguing platform, this article examines the impact of digital exclusion on digital cataloguing outcomes via metrics of quantity and quality. These indicate limited cataloguing outcomes, with community collections obscured, rather than revealed. But these metrics disregard the opportunities for enhancing individual and archival digital inclusion that learning how, and continuing, to digitally catalogue present. By tracing one elderly volunteer’s journey from digitally excluded non-user to capable cataloguer, I show how digital cataloguing offered an opportunity for enhancing this individual’s digital inclusion, simultaneously improving that of the archive. In considering these unintended opportunities, this article contributes to our understanding of how digital exclusion impacts the digitisation of cultural heritage, and offers scope for determining how the process and practice of digital cataloguing itself can present opportunities for inclusion at the individual and archival level.