Identifying, sharing, and preserving heritage are challenging tasks, as cultural and historic landscapes are often disputed. UNESCO's ongoing heroic attempts at creating a unified list of places 'worthy of conservation', overruling local, sometimes competing, narratives, are often contested, as trying to evaluate places and sites as 'heritage' brings up questions of both space and substance – which values? whose heritage? Exposing archives has long been discussed as an issue of post-colonial 'order of things' and extensive attempts are being made to expose hidden archival collections, sometimes termed 'contact zones' for disputed communities. The digitization of archival material, providing important documentation for identifying cultural heritage, is considered an important step towards making such material available, and allowing the production of different narratives. The task of digitization – which includes identification, digitization and most of all, cataloging the archive – is as much a matter of personal and cultural interpretation as it is of technical exposition. The process raises such critical questions as, which material is considered important enough to be digitally handled? Which platforms are most suitable for the creation, analysis and visualization of digital archives and collections, reaching out to as many communities as possible? Which sets of maps should be used for the geographical layout of narratives, and which historical frameworks should be used as reference? And finally, which terms and names are used for identifying people or places, or, to use more professional terms – which vocabularies and semantic data should be used for categorizing databases of various cultures, societies, and national imperatives? This paper is based on an extensive project of heritage documentation and digitization: 'Jerusalem Archives', a joint venture of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem municipality, which aims to locate, expose, and digitize official and personal documentation pertaining specifically to the city's modern building and planning. I will claim that the actual exposition of archives and their digitization contribute directly to the creation, recreation and the support of historic narratives and examine possibilities for making archival documents accessible, not only technically, but also essentially.