Dansekroppe i arkivet: Forskeres og danseres oplevelse af visningsscenarier af født digitalt materiale af en kompleks karakter fra Dansearkivet på Det Kgl. Bibliotek

The organization and accessibility of complex born-digital archives is one of the greatest challenges special collections face today. A digital archive breaks with the archival practices and theories that apply to physical archives because the authenticity of digital documents must be understood fundamentally differently than when working with physical records. A digital document can be difficult to timestamp, and determining the authorship of a document can also be challenging. From an editorial-philological perspective, it can be hard to ascertain with certainty which version of a document is the final version based on its version history. Furthermore, hybrid archives can exhibit significant redundancy, as digital documents may have been printed and stored in a physical archive, possibly with handwritten notes, stamps, or signatures.

Based on one of the first complex born-digital archives received by the Royal Danish Library in 2015, the Dance Archive from Dansehallerne, which documents dance in Denmark from 1970 to 2014, this study investigates various sorting and display strategies for complex born-digital archives using the Digital Forensic Toolkit (FTK). The archive consists of 105 floppy disks containing dance documentation and two hard drives with materials related to the formation of the archive. The testing was conducted in December 2024 at the Royal Danish Library with a test group consisting of two choreographers/dancers and two researchers. All participants were part of the same research project, preparing a joint workshop on the Mikado Danse Ensemble (1989‑1999).

The test group was presented with four different setups, ranging from raw, unsorted material, including files that could not be opened, to material tagged with choreographers’ names. Finally, there was a sorting at the file type level.

The study shows that it is essential for the archival institution to consider who the users are when developing metadata: the present users or the future users. Although all participants had domain knowledge, contextualizing the materials relevantly proved to be a challenge. Viewing metadata in relation to material types was helpful, but particularly the arbitrary file naming and the lack of knowledge about who authored what and when highlighted the need for added metadata that could provide information about dates and work titles.