Introduction
In this paper, we focus on archival documents that inform the multinational, multilingual history of the Arabian Gulf region and their appraisal in view of the present and future use in digital scholarly research. The perspective we adopt is that the appraised document – after acquisition and digitization – can have an immediate reuse value. The capacity for reuse is determined, of course, by both the form of the object, the concerns of digital researchers and the way that it is manipulated for research reuse. Often that transformation takes several steps requiring specialised expertise. Objects that matter [objets qui comptent], Kaplan suggests, are those that hold many meanings-material, historical, even emotional-and these objects compel us to make new uses, and new interpretations, of them (Kaplan 2012: 15).
Of course, this has been the case of archival practices, long before the age of the computer and the internet. With digital environments, however, we argue that w...