The Digital Humanities Australasia 2025 conference theme of "Digital Archipelagos" provides an apt metaphor for exploring how seemingly isolated "islands" of collection-managing institutions can maintain their distinctiveness while being closely connected to address global challenges. This paper examines how archives and museums can transcend institutional and disciplinary silos to collaboratively address sustainable development and social inequality at local levels.

This paper advocates for a conceptual shift in the approach to collaboration between archives and museums, particularly at the local level. Rather than approaching institutional convergence primarily through a lens of (economic) efficiency and effectiveness, it is proposed that collaboration should be oriented toward achieving greater societal impact, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Just as archipelagos consist of separate yet interconnected islands, archives and museums – by starting from their unique strengths – can build more meaningful bridges to jointly tackle complex societal challenges than by merging into a single ‘supra-institution.’

Drawing on the case of Flanders – through sectoral surveys and in-depth interviews with coordinators of municipal archives and museums as well as central policymakers – this study investigates how professional identities, role perceptions, and (inter)sectoral dynamics either foster or hinder meaningful collaboration between local collection-managing institutions.

The findings indicate that bottom-up institutional interests perpetuate sectoral siloing and that top-down governance primarily focuses on control mechanisms rather than transformative societal impact. A critical gap is identified in the ability to mobilize intellectual capital to collectively address major societal challenges, that highlights how a casuistic approach stemming from control-oriented policy frameworks fails to facilitate meaningful collaboration.

The paper calls for multi-actor collaborative models (and instruments) that transcend institutional and disciplinary boundaries, without losing sight of the importance of disciplinary specificities. It is argued that disciplinary convergence rather than institutional merger is more likely to lead to synergistic impact on sustainability, justice, and socio-cultural inequality in local communities. Policy development should focus not only on increasing institutional critical mass, but also on developing and catalyzing inter- or pan-disciplinary competencies, collaborative instruments (including but not limited to digital tools, platforms and data-architecture) as well as ‘policy critical mass’. Finally, the paper reflects on how the formation of professional identities in education can be reimagined from a critical perspective, centering on an issue-driven, multi-layered, heritage-practice-oriented approach to societal challenges.

A major impediment to longevity of DH research is the obsolescence of platforms, software, and systems. Increasingly, DH practitioners are becoming aware of the risks of project endings [1] including the failure of tools or of websites in which data is contained. We all know of many funded projects that produced important primary materials which are then lost as funding ends, with the only outputs valued by the funders being publications. If we wish to safely preserve the primary materials, it is essential that research data is stored in a future-proof format incorporating appropriate metadata. As an example, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) has always stored up-to-date metadata in an XML file in the same directory as the item it describes. This has allowed individual items to be copied from the collection and returned to source communities, complete with cataloging information. This non-standard XML has now been superseded by a standards-based linked-data JSON-LD document called a Research-Object Crate (RO-Crate) [2]. In this paper, we describe how the Language Data Commons of Australia is developing tools to create, edit, and explore collections that are expressed in RO-Crate. These standard tools will enable a range of projects to adopt RO-Crate. They are accompanied by a set of Protocols for Implementing Long term Archival Repository Services: https://w3id.org/ldac/pilars.

[1] https://endings.uvic.ca/

[2] Soiland-Reyes S, Sefton P, Crosas M, Castro LJ, Coppens F, Fernández JM, et al. Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate. Data Science. 2022 Jul 20;5(2):97–138.

At the moment, there is little consensus or consistency across research databases and collections nationally and internationally on if and how to record important metadata on agent records. This is a problem because a lack of common understanding and shared practices produces inconsistent logics and limits the interoperability of various platforms. In response to this situation, two of the major Australian humanities digital databases – AustLit, the Australian literature bibliographical database, and the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), the Australian historical/biographical database – are collaborating on a project that aims to align definitions – and the policies and procedures that underpin them – across a range of fields in agent records, including cultural heritage, religion and gender. While these three categories are important ones for both databases, they are currently approached quite differently by each, as well as by other Australian humanities databases. Moreover, aside from practical issues, a range of ethical questions are at stake here, such as how we handle gender, culture and religion in inclusive and respectful ways. In this paper we explore the current state of affairs and associated problems. We also share some of the key questions and considerations driving the project, focusing on the three categories identified above, and use examples from the AustLit and ADB databases. This is an important project for Australian digital humanities databases, with the potential to generate standardised definitions across HASS data throughout both the tertiary and GLAM sectors.