The mass digitisation of analogue holdings is the key to heritage organizations becoming an integral part of the web. In the case of fragile carriers, digitisation is a means to ensure long-term preservation of the information. Digitisation is also a precondition for creating new access routes to collections. Archives can benefit from using a range of automatic annotation technologies and built services targeted towards specific user groups.
Once cultural artefacts are digital and part of an open network, they can be shared, recommended, remixed, mashed, embedded and cited. In this way even the most obscure artefacts can command attention. Archives and their users are now beginning to inhabit the same, shared information space. Innovative new services are being launched that explore this fundamentally new paradigm of participation in this domain. Participation can have a big impact on the workflows of heritage institutions, for instance, by inviting users to assist in the selection, cataloguing, contextualization and curation of collections. These new forms of interaction can also lead to a deeper level of involvement of users with the collections. Furthermore, the adaptation of usage tracking tools can be applied not only for evaluation purposes, but also as basis for more personalized services.