Catching up to the present: join the born-digital community of practice

When historians tell stories of life in the latter half of the 20th and beginnings of the 21st century they will do so from an evidentiary basis of born-digital primary sources: e-mails, websites, Word documents, PDFs, video and audio files. It is from born-digital objects like these that people of the future will come to understand our world. I continue to use the somewhat awkward phrase ‘born digital’ because for most library, archives and museum professionals digitisation remains their default conception of what digital collection content is. That needs to change. We need to catch up to the digital present and I think The No-nonsense Guide to Born-digital Content can help us.

Librarians, archivists and museum professionals need to collectively move away from thinking about digital, and in particular born-digital, as being niche topics for specialists. If our institutions are to meet the mounting challenges of serving the cultural memory functions of an increasingly digital-first society the institutions themselves need to transition to become digital-first themselves. We can't just keep hiring a handful of people with the word ‘digital’ in their job titles. You don't go to a digital doctor to get someone who uses computing as part of their medical practice, and we can't expect that the digital archivists are the ones who will be the people who do digital things in archives. The things this book covers are things that all cultural heritage professionals need to get up to speed on.

I am thrilled to have the chance to open Heather and Walker's book. I have known both of them directly and indirectly through our shared travels through the world of digital preservation. In what follows I offer a few of my thoughts and observations for you to take with you as you work through this book on a journey into the growing digital preservation community of practice.