Digital Archiving Beyond Preservation

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_8How to use a DOI?

Keywords

digital archiving; knowledge/power; cultural memory; narratives

Abstract

This paper studies Digital Archiving beyond preservation, focusing on power, knowledge, and narratives. Digital archiving, a process and act of storing information sources and resources in the digital space. The documents and items are stored, retrieved, and disseminated from repositories. However, it is more than the neutral act of scanning documents and storing; it encompasses the processes of collecting, preserving, organizing, and providing access to materials in digital form, including manuscripts, rare books, newspapers, paintings, photographs, film archives, artifacts, sculptures, and digital-born content. By creating cultural memory into systematic knowledge through categorization and metadata, digital archiving becomes a knowledge system.

This paper discusses the ethical and theoretical framework of digital archiving, rather than technical, and as a site of tension, one that doesn’t merely store or retrieve but actively shapes and reshapes through the act of selection, categorization, and dissemination. Drawing on concepts of power/knowledge, as well as epistemic justice, this paper examines how oral traditions and fluid narratives are reconfigured into fixed metadata descriptions and curated, often influenced by dominant narratives.

Who determines what is preserved or omitted, and on what basis? Does it risk reshaping oral traditions and sacred knowledge of broad cultural memory? How do factors like gender, class, and status influence archival decisions? Instead of offering definitive answers, this paper tries to highlight the complexities, conflicts, and shortcomings of digital archiving, while acknowledging its potential for broader accessibility and cultural continuity.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Archita Nongthombam
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/23
TI  - Digital Archiving Beyond Preservation
BT  - Proceedings of the Indo-Bhutan Social Science Conference 2025 (IBSSC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 59
EP  - 63
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_8
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_8
ID  - Nongthombam2026
ER  -