This post is just to share an amazing talk by C. Toby Edgar and Rebecca Barnott-Clement on a project they did which helped a First Nations community digitise their heritage collections. The talk is titled Collaborative models of care: preserving Australian First Nations digital cultural heritage and was the winner of the International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration and Cooperation. The talk was part of the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Digital Preservation Masterclass series.
The project involved going to the Ramingining community in the Northern Territory to work with the Bula’Bula Arts Centre. This talk taught me so much about what it means to truly collaborate with First Nations peoples, and the immense amount of things that we can learn from engaging consistently with their communities. Giving First Nations communities sovereignty over their cultural artifacts is integral to having ethical collections and archives and this talk has some great examples of how to do that.
The talk is only 15 minutes long and I can HIGHLY recommend giving it a listen even if you don’t work in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) field.