Digital Significance

Abstract

This chapter proposes the idea of ‘digital significance’ as a governance and decision- making process for assessing the value of digital collections. This concept is inspired by Australian approaches to valuing heritage, which have had an important international impact in providing an alternative to the built-fabric conceptions of heritage (e.g., Venice Charter) that have dominated the field. Specifically, Australia’s 1979 Burra Charter helped establish a set of guidelines for assessments that amended the bias towards the built fabric (a bias that favored the heritage of colonizers) implicit in the 1964 Venice Charter. The Burra Charter introduced the concept of ‘significance’ and became a step in creating pathways for the recognition of Aboriginal heritage, for which criteria based on the Venice Charter proved insufficient. I would like to argue that the focus on significance should also play a role in digitisation policy. The structure of the chapter is as follows: I begin with a brief presentation of the concept of significance, to then discuss how digital significance could be an extension of this approach. I then look at key aspects of digitisation in the EU to then present in more detail the case of Norway, where I worked for a brief period as senior advisor on museums and digitisation issues at the Arts Council of Norway in 2018. I end the chapter by reassessing the idea of digital significance presented above and how it could aid in further developing collection digitisation policy.