From 9-13 June we are celebrating International Archives Week, where the global archives community comes together to explain why supporting archives and archivists is so important.
This year’s theme is #ArchivesAreAccessible: Archives for everyone. Accessibility is often cited as one of the goals of digitisation work, and this is certainly the case for the ESA Archives own digitisation project, where since 2023 we have opened nearly 30 collections of documents and photo to ESA colleagues and the general public. Last year’s series of ‘discussions on digitisation’ talked about some of the new technologies that we are embracing to open up and preserve our collections (from IIIF to FITS), and how they can ensure that the resources we safeguard are available to all, removing the barriers of geographical location and physical limitations.
But putting material online brings its own set of issues. Once on the web, for example, images can be reproduced without attribution or credit and can be disassociated from their metadata, resulting in a loss of information, context and ultimately, their guarantee of authenticity.
This ties in with debate in recent years within the heritage sector in the press and on social media about the use of AI generated imagery to re-imagine the past and the potential for misuse to drive a particular interpretation. How can you know what’s ‘real’ anymore? And how will this affect our understanding of the past and our faith in photographic and documentary evidence as a reliable source?
Archives could well be the antidote, in the way that they act as badge of verification. You can trust that material from an Archive is both authentic and curated – that it comes with clear and comprehensive metadata including information on its provenance, content and copyright.
And likewise, users can also play their part by being responsible and sustainable – by following best practices for referencing material and sources and using tools like IIIF (the international framework for image interoperability) to access the relationship between the object and its metadata.
As the International Council for Archives notes, ‘Archives and archivists play an important role in accountability, transparency, democracy, heritage, memory and society’. Their integrity has never been more important!
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