Standards for Digital Curation: Improving Accessibility in Digital Public History Spaces for People with Disabilities and Across Cultural Boarders
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Within public history the concept of digital curation is, comparatively, relatively new despite the growing role it plays in the education of the public for any institution. While museums and other institutions, such as archives and libraries, work to uphold long established standards within their physical spaces, digitally curated spaces, due to the fundamental presentational differences of the format, do not always manage to meet the same standards for public history as their physical counterparts. Digital exhibits and other digital public history spaces have the capability of reaching a much larger global public audience than any of their physical institutions and yet the same care that is put into ensuring physical institutions are accessible to a wide range of patrons is not given to those digitally created areas. Physical museums will often work to meet national or international presentational and accessibility standards, such as those set by the American Alliance of Museums and offer tools to help aid in limiting the accessibility challenges patrons may face during their visit. Many institutions offer audio tours for those with limited vision, as well as written text and video transcripts for those with hearing impairments. Institutions may even offer their audio tours in a multitude of languages for those who do not speak the institution’s native language. The same cannot be said for the efforts made for digital curation. Today institutions who take such care and consideration of their physical spaces in order to create a cohesive, accessible experience are following expectations and standards that have been established through decades of effort. For digital curation, on the other hand, methodologies are relatively new and without even a general set of standards each institution approaches their digital spaces with a different idea on what even the most basic of elements should contain. This results in the quality and functionality of digitally created spaces to vary drastically from one institution to the next, oftentimes failing to achieve the expectations that have long since been held in every other aspect of the public history field. The creation of standards for digital curation is a necessity for the future of the public history field in order to ensure that in an ever increasingly technological world, the quality of information being put forth by institutions upholds what quality and reliability that the public has come to rely upon. Creating standards for digital curation is not meant to limit what institutions can create but to ensure that each institution is putting forth spaces that uphold the foundations of public history through accessibility, accountability, stewardship, and education. By establishing standards that discuss how current practices can be elevated to incorporate accessibility and language elements into their existing spaces, and by creating a foundational set of goals for institutions who create new spaces, this project can help public history institutions achieve online what they have in person for decades, an educational, accessible space for everyone to learn from.