Building Trustworthy Digital Community Archives at Virginia Tech

This presentation will outline our grant-funded research into building trust with smaller organizations in southwest Virginia by collaborating with stakeholders on curating non-custodial digital archives. Small regional institutions and organizations possess rich cultural heritage collections but lack robust digital infrastructure. This barrier inhibits broader access and use by researchers and the wider public. Larger institutions are able to digitize and provide access to such collections, though too often it occurs through physical acquisition, resulting in smaller institutions losing their unique materials. This presentation will describe our methods for building trust and infrastructure internally at Virginia Tech University Libraries and with cultural heritage institutions in southwest Virginia.