Conceptualising the Digitisation and Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge: The Importance of Attitudes

In this paper, we discuss factors that influence the digitisation of cultural heritage resources and outline differences in the challenges faced by memory institutions in developed and developing countries. Increasingly, memory institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) are taking advantage of digital technologies, including social Web technologies to digitise, share and preserve heritage resources to create national repositories with the hope of eliminating gaps in future memory. They also seek opportunities to engage with and involve owners of cultural heritage resources and key stakeholders in the digitisation of their heritage collections. Nevertheless, memory institutions have faced various challenges in doing so. In developed countries, memory institutions are mainly challenged by how to navigate the enormity of the collections that need to be digitised and preserved. In developing countries, different forms of negative attitudes towards digitisation hinder progress in digital preservation management. Owners of cultural heritage resources fear permanent loss of their heritage, key stakeholders lack interest in heritage digitisation, and information professionals have conflicting ideas on how to go about the digitisation process. Our analysis reveals attitudinal issues can have a significant impact on digital preservation. Even though attitudinal issues have been mentioned in previous studies, they are often treated more at an implicit level. We argue that in the context of cultural heritage digitising and preserving involving source communities and various stakeholders, the attitudinal dimension ought to be a key consideration and as such, should be made explicit in discussion of these.