Through documenting, preserving, and making local heritage accessible, digital cataloguing offers community archives significant potential benefits. But undertaking digital cataloguing in this context is not without challenges. Community archives depend on intermittent funding, have restricted access to digital connectivity and devices, and rely on elderly volunteers who often lack the digital skills required. Following Thomas and colleagues’ digital inclusion framework, which considers the capacity for accessing, affording, and having the digital abilities to ‘use online technologies effectively’ (Thomas J, Barraket J, Wilson C K, Holcombe-James I, Kennedy J, Rennie E, Ewing S, MacDonald T (2020) Measuring Australia’s digital divide: the Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. RMIT and Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, for Telstra, p 8), community archives can be considered digitally excluded. Through an ethnographic study of one community archive’s use of Victorian Collections, an Australian digital cataloguing platform, this article examines the impact of digital exclusion on digital cataloguing outcomes via metrics of quantity and quality. These indicate limited cataloguing outcomes, with community collections obscured, rather than revealed. But these metrics disregard the opportunities for enhancing individual and archival digital inclusion that learning how, and continuing, to digitally catalogue present. By tracing one elderly volunteer’s journey from digitally excluded non-user to capable cataloguer, I show how digital cataloguing offered an opportunity for enhancing this individual’s digital inclusion, simultaneously improving that of the archive. In considering these unintended opportunities, this article contributes to our understanding of how digital exclusion impacts the digitisation of cultural heritage, and offers scope for determining how the process and practice of digital cataloguing itself can present opportunities for inclusion at the individual and archival level.

通过记录、保存和使当地遗产易于获取，数字编目为社区档案馆提供了巨大的潜在利益。但在这种情况下进行数字编目并非没有挑战。社区档案依赖于间歇性资金，对数字连接和设备的访问受到限制，并且依赖于往往缺乏所需数字技能的老年志愿者。遵循 Thomas 及其同事的数字包容性框架，该框架考虑了访问、提供和拥有“有效使用在线技术”的数字能力的能力（Thomas J、Barraket J、Wilson CK、Holcombe-James I、Kennedy J、Rennie E , Ewing S, MacDonald T (2020) 衡量澳大利亚的数字鸿沟：澳大利亚数字包容指数 2020。RMIT 和墨尔本斯威本科技大学，为 Telstra，p 8)，社区档案可被视为数字排除。通过对一个社区档案馆使用澳大利亚数字编目平台 Victorian Collections 的民族志研究，本文通过数量和质量指标检验了数字排除对数字编目结果的影响。这些表明编目成果有限，社区馆藏被掩盖，而不是被揭露。但这些指标忽视了增强个人和档案数字包容性的机会，即学习如何并继续以数字方式编目存在。通过追踪一位老年志愿者从被数字排除的非用户到有能力的编目员的旅程，我展示了数字编目如何为增强此人的数字包容性提供机会，同时改善档案馆的包容性。