EViDAnCE - Exploring Value in Digital Archives and the Comainn Eachdraidh

Rural areas have strong place identities, formed through the reproduction of traditional cultural practices alongside contemporary influences. These identities are performed and constructed through a repertoire of knowledges, histories, and customs, and include modes of expression such as story-telling, music and song, poetry and literature, dance and drama. Together with material objects, artefacts, sites and cultural spaces, these form dynamic cultural heritages. Both tangible and intangible heritage activity takes place in remote rural areas. Community based initiatives play an important role in such areas in the collation, production and communication of local cultural heritage. The Outer Hebrides contains 14 of Scotland's 28 Comainn Eachdraidh (CE) or historical societies which began in the 1970's with a very specific political and cultural purpose. Within their recent history, there has been a specific turn towards the digitisation of such work but to-date the relationship between the production of lived and virtual heritage is little understood and valued.

Community digital archives represent both a major economic asset and a key community resource, having potential as education tools, for empowerment through co-production of local knowledge, to encourage community engagement in local history, and for recreation and tourism consumption purposes. Yet, the conversion to digital archives is not a neutral process. The interrelationship between volunteers, professionals and digital applications needs further interrogation to understand the fluid practices involved. By comprehending these networks of cultural heritage production the value of such digitisation initiatives will be understood in terms of how they assist or problematize community development and cohesion, cultural preservations, individual identity, wellbeing and finally how they contribute economic value to communities.

This project seeks to create impact across the stakeholders involved in the research and dissemination. For the Comainn Eachdraidh (CE) and Hebridean Connections (HC) the project seeks to have two primary impacts in terms of how they conduct their work. First, the project will seek to show how digital technology has an effect upon cultural value and is of benefit to the Islander communities. This is central to HC as it is trying to expand its collections into more CE groups. By having an evidence base that backs up the value of their work, this would make their case for joining CE, and improving the collections, much stronger. Second, the project wants to highlight, on a national level, the work of the CE, as a model for embedded heritage production in all communities thus increasing the presence of the CE as cultural entity.

We will give a different perspective in terms of understanding and measuring cultural value from a very different setting to the rest of the UK. With previous focus having primarily been on more urban and institutional perspectives, a key impact of this project is to showcase how non-institutional and bottom-up organisations have the capacity to create real and sustainable cultural value for communities, in terms of their cultural, social and economic benefit to different locations.