As a program to tie-in with the upcoming DHS annual conference - Design in an Age of Uncertainty - this virtual roundtable chaired by Michelle Jackson-Beckett brings together library, archives, and museum professionals in design history and related fields to discuss the paradoxes of digitization in research collections, and the future landscape of research in the face of uncertain funding and staffing across the field.
The rise of digitization in the last 30 years in international academic research libraries has completely changed the landscape of research in design history and related fields. Divisions within research libraries devoted to digital imaging or preservation reformatting work with subject and metadata librarians, curators, technical services, and many other staff to bring greater accessibility and discoverability of archival materials, rare books, special collections, and reference literature. The positive attributes of this digital turn in scholarship are manifold—from researchers limited by restrictive visas in their home countries, classes that cannot visit faraway locations, and the problem of serving rare items to researchers and the public that may be too fragile to consult physically. Digitization and digital access, however, have always been fraught, now more than ever.
Reductions in funding and expert staff across the field in recent years have seen the concept of digitization deployed as a panacea for managing the research landscape today, and not only in the history of design. Much like AI, the immense human labor, ecological footprint, and infrastructure required to catalogue, digitize, and host research collections online is often concealed not only to the public, but also to the constituent user populations. Design and architectural collections require further specialized labor in quality control, often with intensive digital photography processes, expert color correction, and postproduction editing that go far beyond a basic scan of a book, drawing, or map. The perilous position of Internet-based public collections was most recently underscored during recent Denial-of-Service cyberattacks on the Internet Archive, a major partner in hosting digitized books from massive research collections, like the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives as well as most major university research libraries in the United States. The fact that digital access could disappear so suddenly, if temporarily, underscores the instability of a digitized research landscape in the future.
How can design librarians, curators, archivists, conservators, and researchers come together to spotlight these issues and encourage interdisciplinary advocacy for the future?
Thursday 27 August 2026, 2pm BST / 3pm CEST / 9am EDT
Format: Four presentations followed by a discussion and Q&A.
Speakers:
- Moe Elhossieny, Founder of the Arab Design Archive and Repository, Cairo
- Aliza Leventhal, Director of Fleet Library, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), co-founder and co-chair of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Design Records Section’s Digital Design Records Committee
- Dr. Amelia Knowlson, Lecturer in Digital Creativity, University of Leeds
- Jessica Walthew, design conservator specialized in digital media, PhD Candidate at University of Glasgow, formerly conservator at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Michelle Jackson-Beckett, PhD, is a design historian and currently serves as Curator of Rare Books at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Library in New York City. She has extensive experience as a curator and archivist in major design and architecture-related special collections at academic research libraries in New York City and Vienna. She serves on the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars and on the Collection Development Committee of CARTA, the Collaborative Art Archive of the Internet Archive.
This event is free to attend for DHS members and delegates of the 2026 DHS annual conference, and £5.00 for non-members and those not attending the conference. All ticket proceeds support the Design History Society's non-profit charitable aims.
Please register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-promise-and-peril-of-digitization-in-design-history-research-tickets-1996979293825
Zoom link will be emailed to all attendees 24 hours before the advertised event start time.