Investigating cultural heritage data integration with an ANT perspective

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the difficulties encountered when integrating e‐Government systems across jurisdictions. The study focusses on the entanglement of social and technical interests involved in e‐Government integration projects and in particular on managing the tensions which arise between global and local network actors.Design/methodology/approach – A case study of Australia's first attempt to make the nation's cultural collections accessible from a single online resource is conducted based on extensive archival data. This historical analysis applies concepts associated with Actor‐Network Theory as a theoretical lens to investigate relationships between various actors and to trace the trajectory of the project.Findings – The analysis reveals that although the project originated from large institutions, buy‐in was restricted to individuals and the most significant value was for smaller organisations. Furthermore, although the global networks that governed the project could translate t...

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