Postgraduate Course: Future Library and Archive Collections (EFIE11441)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course explores the future of libraries and archives in the context of digital preservation, access, and cultural memory. It introduces students to the fundamentals of electronic legal deposit and digital collecting, and examines the political, technical, ethical, and environmental challenges shaping contemporary information institutions. Key topics include artificial intelligence in libraries, web archiving ethics, community and endangered archives, sustainability, digital forensics, born-digital collections, and the commercial dimensions of digital archives. Through lectures, case studies, guest speakers, group work, and hands-on digital workshops, students develop critical perspectives on digital cultural heritage and gain practical experience in communicating complex preservation issues through collaborative and creative digital artefacts. |
| Course description |
This course introduces students to the key challenges of digital collecting and preservation in contemporary libraries and archives. It begins with the fundamentals of electronic legal deposit and digital collection practices, before moving towards the practical, ethical, and institutional problems these infrastructures raise in real-world settings.
Each four-hour session includes a combination of lecture content, group-based activities, and discussion of case studies, and, where applicable, presentations or discussions with GLAM professionals. Guest speakers are drawn from institutions that have provided case studies to the course in earlier iterations (including the National Library of Scotland, Gale, Cambridge University Libraries, the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives, and the University of Edinburgh Archives), in order to expose students to current professional practices. The last sessions is a practical tutorial for creating the Digital Artefact for the assignment.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute delivers many of its courses in hybrid mode. This means that you may have some online students joining sessions for this course. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities.
Students should be aware that:
- Classrooms used in this course will have additional technology in place: in some cases, students might not be able to sit in areas away from microphones or outside the field of view of all cameras.
- All presentations, and whole class discussions will be recorded (see the Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom policies for more details).
- You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, physical keyboard, and internet access.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 30 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 18,
Summative Assessment Hours 2,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
This course adopts an assessment for learning philosophy, which will be explained to students from the outset. Assessments are viewed as a means of supporting and enhancing learning throughout the course.
In alignment with this ethos, the assessments are designed as follows:
1) Group Presentation (30%)
Workload: the equivalent of 800 words per student.
Students work in groups of four to five and receive a digital preservation case study challenge, which they research and prepare for presentation. The presentation should address critical aspects of the case study, for example, the following questions:
- What are the key challenges, and what solutions would you propose to preserve the given materials?
- What types of materials need to be preserved, and how are they currently stored and accessed?
- What legal and ethical issues are involved in their preservation?
- What is the potential impact of the proposed solutions on long-term digital preservation?
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 2, 3, 4, 5
2) Portfolio (70%)
The portfolio consists of two components:
2.1 - Digital Object
Students individually produce a digital object that communicates a complex challenge related to the future of library and archive collections to a public audience, using a digital storytelling or prototyping tool. Suggested platforms include ArcGIS StoryMaps or a Twine interactive narrative (suitable alternative formats may be agreed in advance).
The digital object should demonstrate:
- Clear communication of a complex issue.
- Critical engagement with course themes.
- Appropriate use of digital media to support the message.
2.2 - Reflection and Research Log
Maximum length: 1,000 words.
This component includes:
- A reflective account of the purpose of the digital object.
- A discussion of the thinking process behind topic selection and format choice.
- A bibliography and resource list informing the work, including a brief explanation of how sources were identified and selected.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
Feedback will be an integral part of the learning process throughout the future libraries and archives course.
Students will receive feedback through various means such as group discussions, individual consultations, and interactive discussion sessions after the lectures.
In addition, a dedicated formative feedback session will be conducted after the group activity. This session will allow students to receive feedback on their progress, strengths, and areas for improvement.
The feedback will be constructive, focused, and aligned with the learning outcomes of the course. It will help students to develop their critical thinking, research, and communication skills necessary for success in the field of future libraries and archives. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate advanced understanding of the functioning mechanisms of national and international heritage policies and legal frameworks, and critically evaluate their strengths and limitations.
- Apply advanced critical and multicultural approaches to evaluate the work of intergovernmental organisations in the field of heritage conservation in diverse social and geo-political contexts, and propose innovative solutions to complex problems.
- Critically analyse the challenges and potentials of data innovation in heritage preservation, and evaluate the effectiveness of different strategies for managing and sharing digital heritage collections in diverse cultural and institutional contexts.
- Communicate advanced analysis of heritage policy and practice to diverse audiences, using appropriate professional and academic conventions and media.
- Collaborate effectively in multicultural and interdisciplinary teams to develop and implement creative and sustainable solutions for improving current heritage policies and their implementation, and reflect critically on the ethical and social implications of their work.
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Reading List
Essential Reading:
Brügger, N., 2018. The archived web: doing history in the digital age. MIT Press.
Owens, T. (2018). The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation. John Hopkins University Press.
Gooding, P. and Terras, M. eds., 2020. Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the library collections of the future. Facet Publishing.
Jo, E.S. and Gebru, T., 2020, January. Lessons from archives: Strategies for collecting sociocultural data in machine learning. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 306-316).
Jaillant, L. and Caputo, A., 2022. 'Unlocking digital archives: cross-disciplinary perspectives on AI and born-digital data'. AI & Society, 37(3), pp.823-835.
Recommended Reading:
Gooding, P., Terras, M. and Berube, L. (2018) Legal Deposit Web Archives and the Digital Humanities: a Universe of Lost Opportunity? Digital Humanities 2018, Mexico City, Mexico, 26-29 Jun 2018. pp. 590-592.
Falcão, P. and Ensom, T., 2019. Conserving digital art. In Museums and Digital Culture: New Perspectives and Research (pp. 231-251). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Ruest, N., Lin, J., Milligan, I. and Fritz, S., 2020, August. The archives unleashed project: technology, process, and community to improve scholarly access to web archives. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2020 (pp. 157-166).
Thylstrup, N.B., Agostinho, D., Ring, A., D'Ignazio, C. and Veel, K. eds., 2021. Uncertain archives: Critical keywords for big data. MIT Press.
Barrueco, J.M. and Termens, M., 2022. Digital preservation in institutional repositories: a systematic literature review. Digital Library Perspectives, 38(2), pp.161-174.
Beiguelman, Giselle, and Nathalia Lavigne. "The Museum with Only Walls." Digital Age (2022): 468. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/VictoriaWalden/publication/366635501_The_Memorial_Museum_in_the_Digital_Age_ed/links/63ac3134c3c99660ebaf9aa2/The-Memorial-Museum-in-the-Digital-Age-ed.pdf#page=468
Further Reading:
Pandey, Rahul, and Vinit Kumar. "Exploring the Impediments to digitization and digital preservation of cultural heritage resources: A selective review." Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture 49, no. 1 (2020): 26-37.
D'ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F., 2020. Data Feminism. MIT press.
Zuanni, C., 2021. Theorizing Born Digital Objects: Museums and Contemporary Materialities.
Museum and Society, 19(2), pp.184-198.
Richards, N., 2021. Why privacy matters. Oxford University Press.
Mackinnon, K., 2022. Critical care for the early web: ethical digital methods for archived youth data. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society.
Shiozaki, R., 2022. A Note on Law and Economics of Legal Deposit Systems. Libri, 72(4), pp.393-403. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Future,Library,Archive,Collections,Cultural Heritage Futures |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Andrea Kocsis
Tel:
Email: akocsis@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Zoe Hogg
Tel:
Email: Zoe.Hogg@ed.ac.uk |
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