Local, sustainable, discoverable: The benefits of collaboration and digital collection building

Digital collections are a priority for our community. Students, genealogists, researchers and the curious will more often head straight to online resources before digging through physical archives. At the same time, government cutbacks and economic times have shifted the responsibility of access to and preservation of our digital collections to the local keepers of culture. So how do you share your stories and community collections in a way that is sustainable and connected to the larger network of a shared digital heritage? Every collection—whether its shoeboxes of photos, Council records, oral histories or local newspapers—reflects the unique quality of your community, but digitization projects all have similar patterns and challenges. Through the use of smart tools and technologies, and by pooling resources, sharing expertise and collaborating, local collections can be sustainable, managed locally and discovered globally.

Slides: 

apla2013-Notes.pdf