Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Virtual and digital repatriation

This topic came up in class this semester, thanks to Jennifer Peters and I want to pass along two resources on it. 

Hennessy, K. (2009), Virtual Repatriation and Digital Cultural Heritage: The Ethics of Managing Online Collections. Anthropology News, 50: 5–6. doi: 10.1111/j.1556-3502.2009.50405.x
...technologies are allowing members of originating communities to access images of objects, audio and video recordings, and texts documenting their relatives and their material, cultural and linguistic history.  Visual access by these communities to their cultural heritage in online museum and ethnographic collections is known as "virtual repatriation."
Ivan Boserup, I. (2005), The Manuscript and the Internet: digital repatriation of cultural heritage. IFLA Journal June 2005 31: 169-173, doi:10.1177/0340035205054881
...the two libraries establish a joint project and publish on the Internet a digital facsimile of the entire manuscript...Surely the old manuscript has now become a part of Denmark's cultural heritage, probably in a more efficient way than if it had been repatriated physically and hidden in the vault of the Royal Library. 

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