Why Digitize Now?
Global carbon emissions and deforestation threaten every aspect of human life, including our ability to preserve and share our heritage. Adapting to environmental changes, as well as increased flooding, droughts, and other extreme weather events, will be costly for governments around the world and lead to mass migration and war as nations try to harness increasingly limited natural resources. Critically, many of the world’s poorest regions are experiencing the greatest effects of these changes.
Already underfunded, cultural heritage preservation around the world is at risk of being overlooked as the economic costs of the climate crisis continue to mount. At the same time, keeping and sharing historical, scientific, and cultural records hold the potential to help future generations develop resilience as they confront the many challenges of the climate crisis and work together toward solutions. Preserving cultural heritage will be critical to building a climate-resilient future for the planet.
Rapidly changing technologies–especially communication technologies–pose tremendous opportunities as well as unique challenges. From 20th-century analog recordings through today’s digital records, cultural content is being produced in unprecedented quantities and captured on media that are often fragile, becoming obsolete within decades. If the current generation fails to act, much of the audio, audiovisual, and digital documentation that remains will soon pass their useful life spans, and will ultimately be lost forever.
Preserving cultural heritage is a global concern requiring a globally coordinated strategy. Resources dedicated to cultural preservation may be limited, but these limitations should not stall necessary efforts to protect at-risk cultural heritage–particularly heritage threatened by climate-related risks–from permanent loss. Capturing and preserving content digitally using lower cost technologies such as cell phones, scanners, and digital cameras remains the most affordable solution for keeping and sharing cultural heritage. The major obstacles preventing the long-term preservation of digital and digitized content are training and reliable digital preservation and access systems that can be widely shared and sustained over time. This Field Guide serves as a starting point for populations vulnerable to climate-related disasters to develop the capacity to shape how their own heritage is captured, described, shared, and maintained. By recommending widely used standards, low-cost tools, and step-by-step processes, readers can plan and implement cultural preservation projects that can be adapted and scaled up over time.
Questions to Consider
- What purposes are our collections serving?
- Who might be interested in having access to them?
- How might having digital collections help our organization fulfill its overall mission?
- Are there other more pressing priorities to address before digitizing?