Encountering digital collections: Understanding and developing innovative interactions.

Over recent decades, our collections, operations, and audiences have moved from an analogue to a mixed analogue/digital environment. The “digital shift” has transformed our ways of working, the tools and methods at our disposal, our databases, and our catalogues. It has democratised access and enabled new modes of distant reading, but it has also created a fluid and dynamic landscape, of which we are still developing our understanding. This challenge poses several questions for gatekeepers of digital library spaces and the interactions they enable:

• Can we better understand the relationship between the digital and our physical or cognitive processes?
• How does incorporating the digital into our physical lives impact research and teaching?
• What are libraries, in their role as a nexus, doing to understand and facilitate encounters with the virtual world we have created?

This paper presents the ongoing work of an AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship project that is exploring practical approaches to using digital collections in research and pedagogy. The Fellowship seeks to respond to the questions above through five themes that are drawn from some of the embodied actions involved in the matrix of our digital landscape:

1. Methods of note making

2. Practices of walking

3. Processes of collaboration

4. Acts of creation

5. Impact on wellbeing

In doing so, it provides an opportunity to identify commonalities around which libraries can build support and confidence to fulfil their missions with creative approaches that inspire both users and staff. This paper will reflect on the broad range of theoretical and philosophical approaches that are inspiring this project, and how these might be incorporated into the everyday practice.

Whilst the outcomes of this project are ongoing, this paper presents the emerging understanding and will demonstrate this through case-studies of related projects. One such example is ‘Walking with Constable’, a collaborative project that uses rudimentary digital technologies to take archive material back into the physical landscape which created it through a series of curated walks. On the walks, participants explore ways to document the shared experience of viewing and engaging with archive material as a form of public writing. This activity is not only a fruitful way to build collaborations with other institutions but can be an extremely engaging method of facilitating interactions between academics, curators, and wider society. It can democratise access through the creation of a platform on which every participant is considered in expert in some sense, but it can also reach audiences who would not normally physically, or even virtually, come to or use our institutions. This has meant the project has proven a highly valuable route to incorporating those who might be considered underrepresented in academic research processes. ‘Walking with Constable’ thus demonstrates a replicable method of using digital technologies to engage with publics in ways that circumvent the standard formats and infrastructures of library and archive spaces.