Sustainability and Swedish Women's History: Digitizing Photographs from the KvinnSam Archives

Digitization has traditionally been viewed as a method of preservation and accessibility facilitation. This definition has resulted in a sense that objectives of sustainability are somehow built into the process of digitization, allowing institutions to not thoroughly or systematically consider what digitization and digitized collections are, how to ensure access over time, and how these groupings of digital files relate to larger collection management. This paper redefines digitization as part of collections development, a broader set of processes with a long history within archival institutions. This definition allows for the use of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's framework for understanding historical production, placing digitization within an ongoing process that shapes access to and thus alters the historical record. The paper calls for a queering of the understanding of archival sustainability to enable the use of paradata in the development of digital archival description practices. This approach demands an understanding of archive collections as shifting and overlapping processes that interact with one another to form the malleable boundaries of what a cultural heritage institution calls its archives.