Digitisation as a perpetual commitment

In the digitisation discourse, there is a recurring tendency to frame digitisation as a one time commitment – and even when a longterm commitment to maintaining digital information is acknowledged, it is conceived primarily as a technical task rather than an undertaking pertaining to the digitised content. Combined with the parallel tendencies of assuming that the opportunities of and reasons for digitisation are similar across organisations and audiences, and of omitting that their underpinning rationales tend to be much more diverse and nuanced, digitisation risks to stand out as a complicated and costly but manageable task. Considering the diversity of rationales and audiences and their change in time, what is too often neglected is that the most successful digital collections and archives are those that are used and updated regularly. The aim of this presentation is to discuss using examples from digitisation projects how digitisation should be framed as a perpetual commitment of not only ensuring the technical sustainability of digitised assets but also to their use, enrichment and updating to ensure their future relevance and the return of investment of the on-going and planned massive digitisation efforts.