In this panel, we will consider how the Australian Creative Histories and Futures (ACHF) project anticipates transforming individual datasets and databases (perhaps ‘islands’) into a rich ecology of Australian cultural data infrastructure (i.e., an archipelago). The project is led by a consortium including UNSW, Flinders University, Creative Australia and ACMI, and received investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Through focussing on the continued interconnection of cultural data, we seek not only to improve the data holdings of our constituent datasets, but also to facilitate a networked interrogation of Australian creative histories and futures.

Working on multiple databases and datasets together has “highlighted the constructed nature of data curation”, which Sarah Thomasson and Joanne Tompkins argue “questions the notion of fixity in digital resources.” Indeed, our search for harmonisation and interoperability capacity across ACHF partners highlights instead the function of cultural flow, and the capacity of future cultural data infrastructure to more effectively network data through digital curation and stewardship.

By bringing together short papers from ACHF investigators, this panel tacks between the technical and the theoretical, describing:

- the bespoke challenges and obligations that cultural data presents

- the context of the ACHF building on the advances of previous projects and the development of discrete databases over time

- the infrastructures it requires and those which the project may need to invent to support access, context, protection, and preservation

- the industry end users and needs of cultural organisations to access cultural data.