Archive lab: Bootcamps

What are the challenges for archives in the next five years? How can archives contribute to management, accountability and cultural history in the digital age? In collaboration with the National Archive/Programme Archive 2020 and Utrecht University, Waag organized two multidisciplinary bootcamps to explore the future of the archives sector.

The changing context in which archives operate, including the digitization of society, requires new ways of working, new forms of knowledge and knowledge sharing, but may also lead to new tasks for traditional archives.

The purpose of the boot camps was to identify urgent, contemporary issues and to address potential innovation trajectories for the archives sector to relate to the digital society of the 21st century. In the kick-off of the project, several issues were identified such as automatic metadata, authenticity combined with block chain technology, standardization, information security, and the meaning of selecting and destroying in a digital era.

The bootcamps were multi-day, multi-disciplinary sessions in which participants collaborate hands-on on current topics. In the bootcamps future products and processes were developed as (exploratory) prototypes. This design approach helps in defining the shared values ​​on which the innovation should be based, the understanding of underlying principles, possible future scenarios and in offering perspective for action.