Preserving and Sharing Born Digital and Hybrid Objects Across the National Collection

Contemporary culture is increasingly digital. However, this prevalence of digital culture poses a significant challenge to collecting organisations which are responsible for acquiring, preserving and making culture available to the public, now and in the future. In considering how to make our national collections accessible, we must consider born-digital and hybrid material as an increasingly important and uniquely challenging part of those collections.

This project focused on three challenges:

1.       collections management - the policies, governance, systems and standards needed to support born-digital collections;

2.       digital preservation and conservation - the skills, software and hardware needed to preserve them for the future;

3.       meaningful access and experience - the development of modes of access that do not merely represent digital culture as static, but facilitate 'live' engagement with it, evocative of the complex and multivalent experiences it entails.

The project brought together an interdisciplinary team of academic and collections-based researchers and museum professionals from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), British Film Institute (BFI), and Birkbeck, University of London, along with museum and heritage sector and industry expertise. By harnessing the collective skills, knowledge and challenges of individuals and institutions involved with different types of born-digital and hybrid cultural heritage, the project called for a move towards a greater understanding of the needs, challenges and affordances of born-digital and hybrids objects and their place within collections by setting the direction for further research. It also, provided recommendations for the sector that embrace experimental collecting and proposed new models of stewardship, suggested new models for acquisition and provided potential contributions to standards