Assoc ProfessorAmber Cushing

My main area of interest is the context and behaviour that surrounds the act of maintaining digital objects over time. This ranges from the small scale, such as personal archiving, to the broad scale, such as work practices of organisations tasked with digital preservation. My research is largely interpretivist, relying on qualitative methods.

My early works focused on self extension and personal digital archiving, beginning in 2010. I utilised the personal information management (PIM) activities framework to explore maintaining, which ultimately lead me to the study of maintaining behavior in the context of personal information. My PhD thesis explored why people choose to maintain some personal digital objects over others. From this work I was able to characterise a digital possession and how it is distinct from other digital objects, making the item more likely to be maintained over time. In 2026, I completed a scoping review of 142 articles about personal archiving published over a 30 year period.

From 2015-2018, I explored how cultural heritage institutions can provide personal access to historical collections via mobile apps and public voting, which is often referred to as participatory heritage initiatives. This work, the Walk1916 project, was funded by the Irish Research Council. Within this project, I also attempted to understand peoples' motivations for engaging with participatory heritage initiatives, by exploring the opinions of participants taking part in the Digital Repository of Ireland's Weaving Public and Private Narratives project.

In 2020, I began a project exploring the ways in which the structure of the traditional birth certificate does not reflect the needs of modern society and creates inequalities for nontraditional families and individuals born via assisted reproduction. This project sought to gather information from impacted groups and will then utilise that information to suggest a new birth certificate format that can harness technological advances and provide a more inclusive personal document for a diverse modern society. From this work, I co-developed a framework to understand how personal information management can act as a burden (PIM-B) and I then developed a concept of "personal information management as caring" based on care ethics.

In 2023 I lead one of the initial explorations of how the concept of AI technology can impact how digital archivists provide access to and use of digital collections and shape the cncept fo archival expertise. This article won the 2024 Emerald Literati Award for the most Outstanding paper published in the Journal of Documentaiton between 2023-2024.

I also conduct research on digital preservation work and education. I have published work on developing a digital information management programme in Ireland, as well as using one's qualitative research to develop teaching cases for digital curation.