Stories of impact: the role of narrative in understanding the value and impact of digital collections

TitleStories of impact: the role of narrative in understanding the value and impact of digital collections
Publication TypeJournal Article
AuthorsMarsh, Diana E., Ricardo L. Punzalan, Robert Leopold, Brian Butler, and Massimo Petrozzi
JournalArchival Science
Volume16
Issue4
Pagination327-372
ISSN1573-7519
AbstractCultural heritage institutions leverage digitization to fulfill their mission to preserve, represent, and provide access to collections under their care. Despite their common interest in documenting the progress of digitization and online access, the library, archives, and museums (LAM) sector lacks a conceptual framework for assessing and demonstrating the impact of digitized ethnographic collections. Reporting the findings of a yearlong interdisciplinary study, this article underscores the importance of storytelling in articulating the value and impact of digitized ethnographic collections held in cultural heritage institutions. We begin with an overview of the literature on the assessment and describe the methods we employed in our study. Next, we identify and discuss the different ways that stories and storytelling are strategically mobilized in conversations about the impact of digitization. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for cultural heritage practice and collection development.
URLhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9253-5
DOI10.1007/s10502-015-9253-5
Short TitleStories of impact
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