A collaborative model for creating and managing Indigenous digital collections

The Sherman Indian Museum and the University of California, Riverside Library completed a cross-institutional collaborative project to digitise the museum’s rich collection of materials documenting the student experience, institutional culture and community history of one of the few remaining off-reservation American Indian boarding schools still operational in the country. This two-year grant-funded project digitised and provided online access to nearly 14,000 items, totalling over 55,000 pages of content from the museum’s collection. Project activities were guided by the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (PNAAM), to ensure that the digital collection was developed in a culturally-responsible and responsive manner that prioritised the needs of and incorporated knowledge from the Indigenous community. The concepts of mutual respect and reciprocity promoted in PNAAM were fully embedded into the core components of the project from its staffing model and technical approach to its digital preservation and discoverability plan and rights, ethics and reuse strategy. This case study provides a framework that can be leveraged, and further extended, by future collaborative projects seeking to build sustainable, culturally responsive, standards-based Indigenous digital collections. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection, which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.