Interdisciplinarity as the Framework for Transition of Digital to Computational Archive: A Case Study of Digital Curation

The requirements to create a computational archive for the scholarly ecosystem are dissected through a case study of the Sydney Stock Exchange records (1900-1950) digitization project. The digitization of the archival corpus, and computation upon it, have created a new relationship between archivists, technologists, archives, and researchers. The workflows, extensive toolkit, technical processes, skills, and user interactions demonstrate the importance of teamwork, experimentation, and interdisciplinarity for the creation of computational archives. The study analyses the creation from the perspectives of the collection's significance, technology (using a sociotechnical system approach), and organisation (using interdisciplinarity theory). The study finds that new relationships and approaches were required to construct a computational archive. Opening up access to archival collections through collaboration, digitisation, automation, and computation was a new approach for the organisation. The case study identifies further inter-institutional opportunities to develop national infrastructure, discovery, and research data management practices.