Migration, Mobility and Connection | Towards a Sustainable Model for the Preservation of Immigrant Cultural Heritage

Migrating People, Migrating Data

This workshop examines the archival, custodial and digital challenges that impact the discovery, collection, preservation and content management of material and immaterial traces from the past that the Netherlands shares with Australia and New Zealand. In partnership with key institutional and community stakeholders, this workshop builds on new understandings about the experience and representation of migration and how this has shaped an evolving sense of Dutch-Australasian heritage and, with it, the consequences for the formation of cultural identities.

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Source: Australia & New Zealand Bank Limited (ANZ Bank), Australia, circa 1960, Migration Collection, Museum Victoria.

Held at the University of Western Sydney in partnership with Curtin University, Holland House, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University, this event is concerned with the socio-cultural material traces that append to the historical activity of people moving from one region to settle in another — in which the movement of bodies through space combines with information about their mobility through time. At the same time, it is to also about the significant technical and conceptual challenges surrounding the consolidation of different data sources (both hard copy and digital) from a prior generation of technology to successive generations.

For example, many Dutch community groups in all three countries are actively collecting documents, artefacts, photographs and maps to pass on to future generations. However, few have developed sustainable workflows to ensure the longevity of their collections and rarely are they familiar with cataloguing and metadata conventions which help describe an item’s provenance, role and position in the world. Planning for digital preservation therefore is uneven, leading to concerns about a ‘digital gap’ in a community’s history. Mitigating the deleterious effects then of information loss and fading human recollection is an issue central to both the continued accessibility of cultural heritage materials and the digital preservation of historical knowledge beyond technology format lifetimes.