TY - CHAP A1 - Prodan, Anca Claudia A2 - Edmondson, Ray A2 - Jordan, Lothar A2 - Prodan, Anca Claudia T1 - Memory of the World, Documentary Heritage and Digital Technology: Critical Perspectives T2 - The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme: Key Aspects and Recent Developments N2 - This chapter explores the potential that critically oriented perspectives hold for broadened insights about the heritage value of digital documents. Digital technology has significantly changed the way documents are conceptualized, created, accessed, transmitted and preserved, and digital documents are characterized by features that challenge established perspectives. Although any of these features may hold heritage significance, digital documentary heritage is poorly represented in the context of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW), in particular on the International Memory of the World Register, which contains a selection of some of the most globally representative documents in any form, including the digital. Observing that libraries and archives, and their underlying disciplines, which have informed MoW, have been dominated by positivism, this chapter builds on the assumption that approaching documents too narrowly entails the risk of overlooking the manifold significance they could have. Consequently, I suggest that moving away from positivism and adopting critical perspectives might help us understand more comprehensively the manifold heritage significance of digital documents. For illustration, I am using the example of software, and I discuss how the adoption of critical perspectives enables broadened insights about the significance of software, not just as a component in a digital document but also as a document in its own right. Y1 - 2024 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-UBICO/frontdoor/index/index/docId/33065 SN - 978-3-030-18440-7 SN - 978-3-030-18443-8 SP - 159 EP - 174 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER -