Disentangling Ownership in Digital Collecting Practices: Approaches From Across Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums

This article examines approaches to digital collecting across galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) in order to scrutinize established norms regarding the ownership of collections. Challenges to collecting institutions have been particularly apparent in the context of digital heritage, which encompasses a range of activities including digitization, born-digital collecting, aggregation, and collecting from social media. Digital collections can unsettle collections management processes that assume the retention and control of static holdings, due to their reproducibility, proprietary frameworks, and complex rights issues. Using case studies drawn from across different GLAMs, the article identifies three modes of digital collecting: ownership-led, ambiguous ownership, and shared ownership. These three modes demonstrate ways in which institutional ownership claims affect the status of digital collections. The article argues for the need to practice approaches to ownership that offer more productive means of navigating the complexities of digital collecting, thus preserving a fuller sense of what digital collections are.