Is digitizing our cultural heritage a matter of preservation, giving access, or both? An ideological analysis of three Swedish digitization projects

This Masters Degree thesis aims at giving an answer to what underlying ideologies are at work in digitizing our cultural heritage. Other questions to be answered are who are benefiting from a digitized cultural heritage and who are not, and what different opinions about digitizing our cultural heritage can be identified. Two studies are made in this thesis, one of Swedish political documents that concern digitizing our cultural heritage, libraries, museums and archives, and the other one is a study of documentation of three Swedish digitizing projects. In the first study three different, but closely associated ideologies are identified, namely a preserving, b giving access and c a mixture of both, and these are shown in a model. In the second study this model is then used to identify the ideologies of one project from each sector of the so called ABM-sector Archives, Libraries and Museums. All examples of our cultural heritage being digitized as pictures. The method used is making digital pictures or photos of a document, no matter what it consists of. In the analyzed projects these may be a book, photos or handwritten documents. Both studies are made by using a text analysis. The following groups are identified as being concerned with the digitization of our cultural heritage, namely the General Public, Authorities and Institutions, Education and Research, the institution itself the one that holds the project, the staff of the institution and finally commercial actors. Six consequences, meaning generally applicable, from digitizing our cultural heritage are identified as applying to the different interest groups either as an advantage or a disadvantage. This thesis also contains an overview of former research made on digitizing, which shows that opinions in the field differ.Uppsatsnivå: