Sustainability by design: Toward community-centered strategies for durable digital collections

Thurston, Courtnie; Fenlon, Katrina

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/109681 Copy

Description

Title

Sustainability by design: Toward community-centered strategies for durable digital collections

Author(s)

• Thurston, Courtnie
• Fenlon, Katrina

Contributor(s)

• Lakeland Community Heritage Project
• Lakeland community
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Issue Date

2021-03-17

Keyword(s)

• Digital Archives
• Community Archives
• Sustainability
• Digital Preservation

Abstract

Thousands of digital humanities projects and digital community archiving initiatives have created diverse cultural heritage collections, which together constitute an extensive, scattered body of evidence of groups and histories that tend to be underrepresented in mainstream cultural institutions. Because they dwell outside of libraries and archives, these collections confront major barriers to sustainability. The vulnerability of community-centered digital collections compromises the completeness and equity of our collective digital memory. This poster presents a case study of one digital community archive, as part of an overarching investigation of community-centered strategies for sustaining digital collections over time. The Lakeland Digital Archive is an effort of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project to document a historic African American community by digitizing family records and gathering oral histories. This study aims to illuminate sustainability challenges and opportunities in the design and development of a digital community archive. The objectives of this research are to contribute conceptual and pragmatic guidance on community-centered sustainability, to promote dialog and collaboration among institutions and community collections, and ultimately to sustain a more diverse, distributed cultural record.

Publisher

iSchools

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109681

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

• the Institute of Museum and Library Services (RE-246346-OLS-20)
• the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation “Community-centered strategies for sustaining digital humanities scholarship” project

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 is held by Courtnie Thurston and Katrina Fenlon. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

Owning Collections