The DISA Project. Packaging South African heritage as a continuing resource: content,access,ownership and ideology

Abstract

The intention of the DISA (Digital Innovation South Africa) Project is to build a continual digital resource through content based on the initiative of local scholars and dovetailing with the discussion of what it means to constitute a serialized archive of the liberation struggle. The user demand for materials selected is secondary. It is the larger questions which frame this project, such as national policies and processes around heritage, political identities, contested archives, the commodification of the Archive and intellectual property rights. In the South African context the digitization of heritage material for publication via the World Wide Web is a site of struggle and the real challenges are not technological or technical but social and political. Digitizing archives is more than merely collecting and aggregating documents in cyberspace. What is at stake is the politics of memory in digital form and how what is selected for digitization projects frames research agendas and plays a role in curriculum strategies. The development dimension is also paramount, how these projects enhance the public interest, service researchers in the South and promote South-South dialogue. This paper gives a brief overview of the DISA Project, to examine notions of partnership that cut across international boundaries, interrogate the ideological and intellectual ramifications including issues of content selection and access, and review South African policy framework discussions and recommendations.