Engagement of New Zealand family historians with participatory cultural heritage

Abstract

Research problem: The vision of an online participatory culture involving communities contributing information and engaging with digitized collections has been challenged by the reality of low response rates to many digital cultural heritage projects. This study sought to identify factors that encourage or discourage family historians, a group motivated to share information, to contribute to digital cultural heritage projects; to determine how they would prefer to provide their knowledge, and to discover how this may differ for family historians from the Māori community.

Methodology: The research followed an exploratory mixed methods design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six members of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists providing themes for questions in an online survey of the national membership of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists.

Results: Survey respondents were more likely to use commercial heritage databases for their research but were more likely to contribute information to cultural heritage databases. Most respondents would share information and were motivated to establish reciprocal sharing relationships fundamental to building online communities. Lack of knowledge about cultural heritage databases and concerns over ownership, control and the reuse of information were factors that discouraged sharing, especially for researchers of Māori whakapapa.

Implications: Cultural heritage institutions need to actively encourage user-participation by nurturing relationships and earning the trust of the community from which the information is being sought. Further research into encouraging the exchange of information between cultural heritage institutions and their communities is particularly important for Māori, who may remain conflicted between the desire to share and to protect their information.