The paper will conclude by highlighting the paradoxical situation we currently face with regard to digitisation and the state of ‘memory’ in both the global North and South. It might be increasingly common to describe non-digitised heritage as ‘hidden’, but that label suggests digitisation as a miracle cure which can solve the issue. The real problem, however, is that much of our cultural heritage can not even be discovered digitally through institutional collection databases. In Africa, this problem has even more dire consequences as Chamelot, Hiribarren, and Rodet recently pointed out: “There is now a greater risk that archives which have not been previously classified and inventoried will be lost because the slow work of digitization projects monopolizes the time of many archivists” Chamelot, Hiribarren and Rodet 2020). <anchor xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" xml:id="Hlk89069760" />More attention should therefore be paid to (online) cataloguing before digitisation, in the case of materials where neither is done, as well as to linking online archives to catalogues/ descriptive information about offline resources. Cataloguing is a fundamental precondition for enabling access to heritage and without the ability to even find out about important archival holdings online, the question of whether they are digitised or not becomes moot. This is especially true in historical research where knowledge about the materials that exist and could be part of one’s evidentiary basis is a key aspect in framing research designs, and where justifiying the choice of materials that are to be used in a given research project, whether these can be found online or offline, an essential step before the actual research even begins.