The impact of social media on 21st century society and culture cannot be underestimated. Like it or not, social media has a major influence on the way people communicate, find communities and share information. At its worst, it has been a tool for disinformation, abuse of vulnerable people, and interference in democratic processes. At its best, social media has been a powerful tool for communication and organisation in times of crisis. Social media collecting presents great opportunities to capture the ways in which people interact with each other, and the ways in which citizens interact with governments. It could also help address some of the gaps in our current collecting, as sometimes the only documentation of community groups and grassroots movements is found in social networks. As archivists, therefore, we cannot ignore social media as part of our efforts to build representative digital collections. This also presents many challenges, however. How do we ensure that we collect ethically, respect privacy, and maintain the trust of the communities we serve? How should we approach collecting in line with data sovereignty principles and ensure that Māori have control over the collection and use of their data and content? This presentation will provide an overview of the approach taken by the Alexander Turnbull Library as we navigate these challenges and opportunities.

The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia (DCWA) was established in 2021 to assist the HASS sector of Western Australia to digitise its significant cultural collections. Partners in the Centre are the five WA Universities, the State Library of Western Australia and the Western Australian Museum. The Centre has the capacity to create preservation standard digital copies of most transmissive and reflective media, including almost all paper, film and music formats. In this presentation we report on a major ARC funded collaboration between archivists and academics from a range of disciplines. The project, called Life after digitisation: future-proofing WA’s vulnerable cultural heritage, was created to address the previously unfunded digitisation needs of some of the most threatened HASS collections within Western Australia. The chosen collections were the State Theatre archives The Museum of Performing Arts held by the Arts and Culture Trust), the Western Australian Aboriginal Language Centre archives and the Regional and Rural WA Museum collections. Using appropriate cultural protocols and drawing on training program resources at our universities we aim both to create preservation standard digital versions of these collections and to work with the archive managers to plan for the life of their collections post-digitisation. Our vision to use this project as an example of how universities and archivists can work together to secure and share their resources for the benefit of a range of stakeholders in perpetuity.

Many donors bestow their cultural treasures to our safekeeping, believing that they will be safeguarded in perpetuity. But how can we guarantee that our memory institutions will survive into the future? Besides the ongoing threats of funding, resourcing, environmental disasters, political instability & upheaval, cultural institutions in recent years have also had withstand sustained economic, political and religious ideological attack as well as rise of managerialism, incompetence and digital dystopia. Funding threats to such an established public treasure as TROVE has brought home that it may all disappear. With specific reference to the experience of a regional archival institution, we look into what we need to do to ensure two of its most at risk and formidable archives; the NBN Television and Hunter Valley Film Archive and the Hannan Photographic Archive consisting of hundreds of thousands of hours of film and magnetic tape footage and over a million images and respectively, has a succession plan for a sustainable future, akin to the building of a pyramid or a cathedral. How can we create a sense of immortality in our cultural memory institutions? Immune and able to withstand the vagrancies of the philistines who to paraphrase Marie Coleman AO “are no longer at the gate, but are now inside and wrecking the place. “ (ABC The Drum July 6, 2021)