Democratizing the Digital Collection: New Players and New Pedagogies in Three-Dimensional Cultural Heritage / Jane-Heloise Nancarrow

“Three-dimensional modeling and printing of museum artifacts have a growing role in public engagement and teaching—introducing new cultural heritage stakeholders and potentially allowing more democratic access to museum collections. This destabilizes traditional relationships between museums, collections, researchers, teachers and students, while offering dynamic new ways of experiencing objects of the past. Museum events and partnerships…

About the Design for Diversity Project

In 2016, the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University Libraries was awarded an IMLS National Forums grant to support Design for Diversity: a series of public events aimed at developing a teaching and learning toolkit for librarians, archivists, museum specialists, and other cultural heritage practitioners. For more background about the grant and project, visit the Design for Diversity project website.

Design for Diversity focuses on the ways in which information systems embody and reinforce cultural norms, re-inscribing existing inequity and oppression. How can we design systems that account for diverse cultural materials and ways of knowing? While issues of social justice, community partnerships, and diverse collections are becoming more visible in the education of library, archives, and museum workers, the information and system design aspects are not yet a core part, and hopefully this toolkit prompts new educational developments in that area.