There are four categories for the value the digital archive offers its users

According to The National Archives’ Digital Strategy, digital technologies are one of the biggest challenges for archives, because of the changing nature of both the record and record-keeping practices. Digital is profoundly shaping what types of records are created and captured, and transforming how records are accessed and used. At the same time, the potential for applying computational methods and tools within archives and, more fundamentally, for integrating ‘computational thinking’ and ‘archival thinking’, has led some researchers to identify computational archival science as a new field of study.

The computational shift of open government data refers to the move from governments fulfilling information requests to automatically releasing data to fulfill a range of more speculative uses. While promises about the Internet (Morozov, 2013b) encouraged this move, so too did notions of open government from previous decades. For example, David Osborne’s notion of “reinventing government” involved hallmarks familiar to open data initiatives: “catalytic” public–private relationships, connecting with communi-ties, and decentralized collaboration (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992)

On the level of municipal governments in particular, the movement from information to data focused on new uses that emphasized collaboration and utility over accountability (Yu and Robinson, 2012), signaling what I term the computational shift of openness.