One of the ways that digital technology is supposed to change the practice of history is through the collecting and preserving of historical content online. To be sure, millions upon millions of historical texts, images, and digitally reproduced artifacts have already been made available (and presumably preserved) on websites around the world.

But what about the collecting of historical content through open interface archives–archives that invite the public to deposit materials in their collections, either historical artifacts that individuals own and are willing to share, or „history as it happens?“ The open nature of the collecting process–one where anyone can deposit virtually anything into the archive–raises many questions for historians and archivists about the nature of archives themselves. But these sorts of projects can also raise difficult questions for the creators and managers of the projects. In a recent essay, my colleague Sheila Brennan and I try to make sense of at least a few of the lessons we learned in our work on one such project. Weiterlesen →