How digitisation helps ensure cultural heritage stands the test of time
Blogs and Articles
Once cultural artefacts are destroyed—by the environment, catastrophic events, theft, or other events--they are lost forever, erasing a piece of our culture, identity, and history.
Understanding our history is crucial to navigating our future. Our history helps us learn valuable lessons and make better choices while grounding us in our culture and identity.
As archivists, collectors, conservators, curators, librarians, and faculty know, cultural artefacts are tangible items that help us connect with our history and gather important insights about it. However, thousands of one-of-a-kind cultural artefacts are lost each year—now gone forever.
The remaining historical artefacts face the same risk. Many of these cultural assets are aged, fragile, and easily damaged by unpredictable environmental changes, world events, or theft, creating an urgent need to protect them.
That’s why taking action to preserve our cultural heritage is an imperative global mission. Fortunately, digitisation helps answer this need.
How does digitisation help preserve our cultural heritage artefacts?
Digitisation creates digital surrogates of original cultural heritage assets and archives. This provides three important benefits. First, digitisation creates accurate digital representations of original works. Second, it reduces the need to physically handle the assets. Third, digitisation provides access to cultural assets online for people around the world to enjoy and study.
The goal of digitisation is to create access in perpetuity by preserving, stabilising, and digitally converting and storing cultural assets and archives.