Digital Preservation of Ethnic Cultural Heritage

This chapter focuses on the state of the art of digitisation of cultural heritage in Australian archives and libraries in a comparative way. Globalisation and the digital age not only brings new possibilities but also entails on questions of how we perceive ourselves and how we want to preserve our history in a way that it is accessible for scholars and community members, looking for their own family’s history in its societal context across national borders, alike. As migration in all its forms can be seen as a metaphor for the journey of the self and the collective, migrant heritage can also serve as a way to prioritize digitization projects in cultural heritage institutions, as the case of the National Archives of Australia shows. However, more global collaboration and partnerships are needed to virtual reconnect the cross-national scattered (migrant) histories and heritage in archives ‘without walls’.