An ever-growing variety of accessible tools and resources is available for digitizing archival materials, utilised by institutional repositories and community groups. This enables data to be curated in a distributed, decentralised fashion by a wide range of community groups and stakeholders. The increasing democratization is welcome and allows for a greater diversity of resources and perspectives to be represented in the DH landscape. However, due to the highly varied approaches and formats being employed by different groups it nevertheless poses new challenges for the interoperability, interconnectedness, and sustainability of such data.
The Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS) project is seeking to address these issues by developing new tools and archival methods for the integration and linking of community-generated digital content (CGDC) via a process of iterative design and co-production with community archives. Also central to the project is the creation of a post-custodial model that will enable community groups to collect, create, and manage their own digital collections in a manner that maximizes their reach, utility, and value.
Drawing on case studies from our network of existing community archives, our talk will first outline the current trends and challenges relating to community-generated digital content. We will then discuss the post-custodial model being developed by OHOS in response, demonstrating how we address existing limitations while working to empower community groups to generate, manage, and engage with their own data in flexible and creative ways. Consequently, our talk will showcase a newly emerging, evidence-based best practice for the collaborative creation and curation of community-focused Digital Humanities data.