Sustaining Community Digital Collections 

A research-based toolkit for communities and stewardship institutions 

for keeping community archives and digital humanities projects alive on the Web

What are community-centered collections? 

Collections, projects, and knowledge infrastructures that gather, preserve, and provide access to cultural knowledge and evidence. They are created and maintained by communities of many kinds. We focus on digital collections, rather than physical or analog collections. Digital community archives are one important type, but we also count digital humanities projects maintained by and serving research communities. These collections are valuable because they: 

• Provide evidence of people, histories, languages, and cultures that aren't well documented in mainstream memory institutions

• Serve immediate research and memory needs of communities

• Empower communities to speak for themselves

• Rebalance the equity and inclusivity of the cultural record

• Serve as hubs or sites where communities of many kinds make and share knowledge!

What is community-centered sustainability?

Approaches to developing and maintaining durable, thriving digital projects that take community ownership and power meaningfully into account. Community-centered projects are hard to sustain because they tend to be maintained by small teams of volunteers with limited or intermittent funding, and without committed or long-term institutional support. 

Rather than relying only on the conventional approach—of handing off ownership of primary sources or digital artifacts to libraries, archives, and museums—we want to find ways to maintain digital projects and their outcomes over the long term as living, vital, community-owned resources (Fenlon et al., 2021; Fenlon & Muñoz, 2019). Community-centered collections become sustainable as they improve the sustainability of the communities that build and maintain them (Fenlon et al., 2023).