Heritage in the Limelight, a Collection in Progress: Uncovering, Connecting, Researching and Animating Australia's Magic Lantern Past
Date
2018
Authors
Jolly, Martyn
deCourcy, Elisa
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Publisher
Open Library of the Humanities
Abstract
Once they are formed, the digital collections of cultural and collecting
institutions do not exist in splendid isolation. As well as being aggregated
data sets, digital heritage collections are also links to tangible objects and
specific historical experiences. Digital collections may allow users to find
the actual analogue objects from which they were derived, they may allow
users to understand a particular historical experience (or a simulation of it),
they may connect them to a particular place, or they may lead them to other
digital collections. Digital heritage collections need to develop generous
interfaces in order to maximise their unity across these different demands
and to appeal to a variety of users. This article takes as its case study
the digital database and interface made by the Australian-based research
team, ‘Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the
World’. It examines how the culture, ephemera and documentation around
the magic lantern’s use in Australia across the nineteenth and twentieth
century calls for its digital presentation in a dynamic, operational archive.
The following piece surveys scholarly debates around digital collections
that have informed the construction of the Heritage in the Limelight
database and prototype Collection Explorer as well placing the creation of
this Australian initiative in the context of work being done on lantern slide
digital resources globally.
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Open Library of the Humanities
Type
Journal article
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Open Access
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
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