How digitisation helps ensure cultural heritage stands the test of time
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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.
The goal of digitisation is to create access in perpetuity by preserving, stabilising, and digitally converting and storing cultural assets and archives.
What are the challenges of digitising our cultural heritage assets?
While digitisation is needed urgently, there are challenges to digitally preserving cultural heritage artefacts. To start, digitisation requires an initial investment to get started. Digitisation also requires specialised equipment and tailored end-to-end solutions that can adhere to digitisation standards for cultural heritage artefacts. To tie it all together, digitisation mandates the involvement of highly experienced personnel with specific skill sets.
Other digitisation challenges exist. For example, the diverse range of formats, from bound materials to film, audio, video, photographs, and more, are inherent characteristics of cultural artefacts. In addition, collections are growing rapidly, straining limited staff, compounding space restrictions, and increasing physical storage costs.
The five must-haves to digitise our cultural heritage artefacts
Successfully tackling these digitisation challenges requires five key capabilities.
- Specialised expertise. Handling our singular, irreplaceable historical assets mandates deep and highly specialised personnel. This expertise spans all personnel, from archivists to solution designers, and transportation and material handling specialists. Iron Mountain has a professional staff of archivists, librarians, and art handlers dedicated to preservation and customising an end-to-end solution across a diverse range of formats and conditions.
- Compliance. Image quality and digitisation standards, such as ISO 19264, METAMORFOZE, and FADGI, help shape digitisation requirements. To assist our customers, Iron Mountain has long-standing expertise in achieving compliance with archive standards and best practices.
- Long-term support. Collections are dynamic and growing. Thus, preservation and protection approaches must be flexible and scalable for the long term. With a 70-year history, Iron Mountain understands longevity and adaptability and is equipped with a wide range of preservation resources and expertise to meet customer needs today and for the future.
- Bespoke technical skills. Digitising cultural heritage artefacts requires unique technical skills in areas like systems, archival-level digital conversion, metadata, and digital storage. Iron Mountain resources are skilled in metadata practices for international standards and can scale using artificial intelligence (AI). These capabilities improve worldwide visibility, access, and research.
- Global reach. Worldwide presence is helpful to cultural heritage preservation, providing comprehensive coverage for the entire portfolio of cultural assets. That’s why Iron Mountain’s global footprint provides a unique advantage to organisations that preserve and protect cultural heritage artefacts.
Collectively and urgently, we need to take proactive steps to preserve and protect our history and singular cultural heritage assets. Protection and preservation rely on digitisation and special expertise. Iron Mountain is committed to and passionate about helping organisations protect our global cultural heritage artefacts and positively shape future generations for years to come.
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