Seite - 254 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 3:2

254 | www.limina-graz.eu Chiara Zuanni | Heritage in a digital world enables. Conversely, the Collecting Social Photo project and the Museum of Transports in London instead used crowdsourcing methods to collect so- cial media content to guarantee users’ privacy being respected, allowing them to share content only if they are comfortable with this. However, if museums aim to document current society and history, they might need to foster wider collecting initiatives, since it would otherwise be difficult to understand current political events without a broader picture of social media discussions (e. g. on Brexit or on Trump’s politics). A different legal problem is constituted by the infinite replicability of codes, which poses a challenge in justifying the ownership of these collections. In these regards, digital art museums have a longer experience in the policies of managing born-digital content, e. g. when loaning it for temporary exhibitions. How- ever, if the code of a digital artwork can be managed, the ownership of a so- cial media post is more complicated: the rights of the user, of the platform, and – eventually – of the heritage institution collecting it are overlapping and contrasting in unresolved ways. The Library of Congress, in the US, has famously attempted to “collect Twit- ter”: in collaboration with the platform, it acquired the database and set out to prepare it for long-term archival. However, it was soon overwhelmed by the quantity of this big data and the ethical implications, thus failing to complete the project. This points to a last difficulty for museums aiming to collect born-digital data: the size of this so-called “big data”. Born digi- tal content might be immaterial, but it still necessitates care and physical supports (starting with server space), and – in a so-called “big data” era – curatorial choices on relevant material to access, record, and preserve are crucial for the development of sustainable collections of 21st century cul- tures. As Morgan/Macdonald have argued (2018), museums are now facing a “profusion struggle”: i. e. the need of curating and preserving constantly growing numbers of objects “forever”. In a moment in which museums are therefore discussing deaccession and disposal strategies, so as to limit their collections to a manageable size, the collection of born-digital ob- jects, which might constitute “big data”, adds further stress if not rooted in a clear strategy. Curatorial choices on relevant material to access, record, and preserve are crucial for the development of sustainable collections of 21st century cultures.