Archives, Museums, And Other Glam Institutions
Archives enable access to documents, books, articles manuscripts, letters and correspondence, artwork, and other assets that have inestimable value for humanities research. They are clearly a major concern of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – known as GLAM institutions. Because they preserve records of people, places, things, and events, archives are particularly salient for historical scholarship.
As museums, libraries, and archives are considered the retainers of some form of collective memory, they are often called memory institutions to emphasize the linkages between these organizations, increasingly enabled by digital media and network technology (Stainforth, 2016). Consequently, there is a symbiotic relationship between cultural heritage, conceptions of memory, and digital technology. Large-scale digitization projects, such as Europeana Common Culture, provide a sustainable aggregation framework and environment for cultural data, consisting of a virtual “sandbox” for cultural data processing, a data aggregator, and a 3D viewer that facilitates incorporating 3D resources into the project from URLs. In this way, museums, libraries and archives become memory institutions, preserving cultural heritage, leveraging the capabilities of digital technology (Stainforth, 2016).
There is currently a disconnect between digital humanities research and technological advances in born digital preservation, including archival science research. Driven primarily by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions), the science of archiving digital materials and digital archives is highly developed. However, legal, ethical, and copyright considerations, among other factors, make digital humanists reluctant to fully incorporate digital archives into their work (Ries & Palkó, 2019).
The gap between the two communities can be closed, or at least reduced, with further improvements from the archiving community. For instance, born digital archives need interoperable standards and standardized practices and workflows. Such standards are being developed in the archiving community. Digital archives also require advanced application programming interfaces (APIs), which must be accessible to humanities scholars. GLAM institutions must also continue to develop their born digital collections to include the concerns of various user communities, improve preservation methods, curation workflows and practices, and improve access for researchers and other stakeholders (Ries & Palkó, 2019).
Of special relevance to the digital humanities are collections of digitized materials and the concepts of digital archives and web archives. Some archives in digital format consist of digitized copies of entire archival collections. The Clara Barton Papers, physically residing at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., are available in their entirety online. Both content of the collection as well as the folders