An approach to digitisation of cultural heritage in small cultural institutions: infrastructure and community building in a “network of collections” to enable digital sovereignty

Museums, collections, media archives, and other cultural institutions in South Tyrol vary greatly; however, they share a common feature: small size and limited resources, as is typical in the cultural sector. Many of these small institutions play an active role in preserving movable cultural heritage. The responsibility for preservation includes tasks such as inventorying, documenting, cataloguing, and managing movable cultural assets, including museum objects and audiovisual collections (photo, film, audio). These institutions range from associations and foundations to public institutions; however, teams rarely exceed 8–10 people.
This field is characterised by a strong reliance on volunteer work, committed non-professionals, and professionals responsible for multiple tasks, as well as full-time staff for whom collection work represents only one responsibility among many. As a result, digitisation practices differ significantly across organisations.
Around the year 2000, public authorities in South Tyrol recognised the need for a common strategic and centralised approach, both to optimise the use of financial resources and to ensure the quality, accessibility and reusability of digital content. For almost 20 years, the Province of South Tyrol has been providing museums, collections, media archives, and other institutions holding regionally relevant collections with free digital infrastructure for documenting their objects and, since 2010, publishing selected datasets, and, since 2017, providing them as open and interoperable resources. The service includes not only basic and advanced training in the use of the documentation management system, but also ongoing content support, such as quality control, guidance on cataloguing practices, and integration with external authority files.
The talk will discuss how institutions with very different levels of digital competence and capacity can be engaged and supported from the perspective of a local public administration acting as a service provider. In particular, it will address the following questions:
1. How can institutions be activated as partners in the digitisation of cultural heritage?
2. How can they be empowered to retain control over their data and its presentation in the digital environment while making it accessible for reuse?
3. How can they remain active contributors over time within a shared data ecosystem?
4. How can this “network of collections” be sustained through community-building processes that support both collaboration and data sovereignty?