Street Walls to Digital Archives: Preserving? Cultural? Heritage?

In many cases, the digital surrogate is the only resource through which we can access and study a graffito. It is, therefore, essential that such a digital resource is well described, easy to find and access, and can be used in conjunction with other resources or within different projects. This presentation will focus on two of the last parts of the INDIGO workflow, i.e. metadata enrichment and archiving. In particular, it will present the tools and services used by the project, including controlled vocabularies, a spatial database, and a digital repository. This discussion will be framed within the broader question of the status of graffiti as cultural heritage, and will consider in particular how the archiving activity can be influenced by – or could itself influence – the heritagisation of contemporary graffiti.