HA Webinar: Working with digital archives: authenticity, access and critical evaluation

Description

Historical Association webinar series: Historical thinking in a digital world: how history builds digital and media literacy

Presenters: Andrew Payne

Digital archives represent both an enormous opportunity and a complex challenge for developing digital literacy. This session explores how to work effectively with digitised historical sources while building students’ critical understanding of digital curation, authenticity, and access. Drawing on The National Archives’ extensive education programme and online collections (with over 2.5 million annual visitors to their education website), Andrew Payne will demonstrate practical approaches to using digital archives in the history classroom.

The session addresses key questions that underpin digital literacy: How do we evaluate the authenticity and reliability of digitised sources? What gets digitised and what doesn’t—and what does this mean for historical understanding? How do we teach students to understand metadata, cataloguing, and provenance in digital environments? What is the relationship between physical and digital sources, and how does digitisation change our interaction with the past? How can AI support engagement with archival collections while maintaining critical thinking?

Participants will explore The National Archives’ range of resources including themed collections, focused topics, online workshops, and interactive lessons. The session will demonstrate how to use these resources not just as content delivery but as opportunities to develop sophisticated digital literacy: teaching students to interrogate collections for evidence, understand curation decisions, contextualise sources within broader archives, and recognise both the affordances and limitations of digital access. International perspectives will include reference to digitisation programmes at the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Europeana’s cross-European collections, the Library and Archives Canada, and initiatives from Australia and New Zealand.

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