Sustaining Digital Community Collections: Understanding the Impact of Development Workflows Across Contexts
Digital collections created by humanities scholars and community archives are extensive, scattered bodies of evidence of cultures and histories that are often underrepresented in cultural institutions. Born outside of memory institutions, these collections confront major barriers to sustainability, compromising the completeness and equity of our collective digital memory. At the same time, libraries and archives cannot and should not comprehensively collect and maintain the growing mass of digital community collections—particularly where communities wish to retain some level of power over the ongoing care and use of collections. “Sustaining Digital Community Collections” is a three-year Early Career Development research project to investigate roles that cultural heritage institutions may play to help realize community-determined, community-led strategies for sustaining digital collections over time. This project will develop models of development and maintenance workflows to help communities identify points of vulnerability for collection sustainability, along with a toolkit for partnering stakeholder communities and memory institutions.
Duration:
9/1/2020 - 8/31/2023
Additional UMD Investigator(s):
5678
Project Website:
https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/re-246346-ols-20
Total Award Amount:
$381,788.00