Sustaining Community Digital Collections (2019-2024) is a research project to develop community-centered approaches to ensuring long-lived and thriving digital collections and digital scholarship. This toolkit offers a set of resources to help communities and stewardship institutions—especially libraries, archives, museums, and academic institutions—plan for digital project sustainability in ways that align with the values and needs of stakeholder communities, and which highlights community roles in the lifecycles of digital projects. 

Why community-centered sustainability?

• • Digital community archives and community-based digital humanities projects too often prove to be short-lived. Digital cultural projects and collections outside of libraries, archives, and museums are notoriously difficult to sustain for many reasons, including financial constraints, lack of institutional support, reliance on volunteer labor, technical fragility, impediments to shared infrastructure, small audiences, disconnect from systems of scholarly communication and stewardship, etc.

  • But enduring community-based digital cultural projects are vital to an equitable and complete cultural record. These projects often collect and maintain evidence—and innovative interpretive or secondary work—focused on peoples, histories, languages, and cultural phenomena that are not well documented in mainstream memory institutions. Community-based projects often represent the histories and cultures of marginalized groups, rebalancing the equity and inclusivity of the cultural record in such a way that keeps stories and knowledge under the control and power of community ownership. 

  • Handing over projects and collections to libraries, archives, and museums for safekeeping isn't always the answer. We lack models for sustaining digital projects in ways that are truly community-centered—that are responsive to dynamic, evolving community needs and values, and that complement rather than exclusively rely on institutional support. The roles that communities play in sustaining digital scholarship are understudied. A wide variety of stakeholders in digital scholarship—including libraries, scholars, digital humanities centers, funders, and publishers—need a foundational understanding of how communities affect sustainability, and what sustainability means in different community contexts.

Research assistants and postdocs (2019-2024)

Jessica Grimmer, Ph.D.

Alia Reza

Amanda Sorensen

Courtnie Thurston

Travis Wagner, Ph.D.

Nikki Wise

The project summary above is quoted and adapted from our publications. More about the foundations of this research project, including our research methods, can be found in our white paper and other publications.

For definitions of key terms, including community, sustainability, and digital cultural projects, see the Toolkit.

Why the oyster logo? See the Oyster model, one of our core contributions.

Image credits

SDCC Oyster Logo designed by Noah Dibert. 

The banner image is an image of a restored oyster reef in the Chesapeake Bay, credit: Oyster Recovery Partnership via NOAA.gov resource on Oyster Reef Habitats.