Especially within the Digital Humanities living resources can be central research outputs. Examples are databases accessible through websites with additional tools for data analysis, or digital scholarly editions. They are often used for making research data available within a specific (and necessary) context and need to be made as findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable as research data. There are still no standardized workflows and infrastructural services, also not from repositories, for handling living resources in a sustainable way. In fact, many living resources, along with their associated research data, are lost shortly after deployment. In my presentation I will discuss the challenges of handling living resources and relate them to already existing strategies and their vulnerabilities. I will present a new approach for managing living resources by considering the responsibilities of different stakeholders – researchers, funding institutions and data centers/libraries and infrastructural institutions – and argue for their orchestration. In this way, I am contributing to the Open Repositories conference by addressing a central challenge in research and software data management, which at first sight might seem untypical for the conference, but which is a discussion we must have.

This paper explores the challenges, compromises, and inevitable opportunities that arise when a collaborative digitization project comprised of twenty-two partners largely representing smaller higher-education institutions as well as seminaries, a museum and a monastery across the Midwestern United States assemble in support of uncovering unknown or under-documented medieval manuscript collections. Issues emerged around connecting manuscript leaves held across partner institutions, representation – descriptive and structural – given the complexity of medieval manuscripts and the domain’s descriptive practices, and organization of content including metadata for the best legibility. Ultimately, the stakeholders had to balance particular requirements or expectations for this type of material with the reality that the host repository serves hundreds of collections of various types, not just manuscript collections. As part of this balancing act, improvements that would impact all collections were identified as we continue to grapple with providing the best user experience for discovering and reading medieval manuscripts in this general open repository environment.

Students and researchers have been complaining about the unavailability and lack of access and publications on local history, literature, endemic species and disorders, indigenous knowledge in and about the region. The Ili-ili or i-Library and Index to Ilonggo Literature and Indigenous Knowledge was developed to index and digitally archive Hinilawod epic, Ilonggo literature, lubag (x-linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism), endemic species and disorders, and indigenous knowledge. It aims to facilitate easy access and retrieval in libraries, archives, and museums (LAMS). Literary works in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon literature will be indexed, digitized, and/or archived. Additional metadata and apps used, such as UN SGD contribution, Getty Thesaurus, GBIF, controlled vocabulary (UNESCO, MeSH, Library of Congress) and local language, will be described. Later, the repository aims to digitally archive oral histories, epics, traditions, and practices. The presentation will discuss the experiences and challenges encountered in developing and populating the online repository and index. It will describe the efforts of repository managers, developers, LIS professionals, and students. It will highlight the collaborative efforts done with LAMs, researchers, writers, and Indigenous Peoples to preserve and promote their collections and works to address the challenge of digital inclusion and provide access to local and indigenous knowledge.

This presentation highlights a successful use case demonstrating the expansion of open repositories beyond academic and research environments to new communities, users, and types of content. Ethiopian higher education institutions have been pioneers in this field, launching repositories for theses, dissertations, journals, and preprints. As one of the few African countries to adopt a national open access policy, Ethiopia has seen widespread implementation of repositories across academic and research institutions. Following the success in academia, open repositories are now being expanded to other sectors, such as the legislative branch and national statistical agencies. Public organizations, however, require different workflows for document publishing and review compared to academic repositories. This presentation shares lessons learned while customizing the DSpace platform for the Ethiopian House of People’s Representatives by including workflows to capture real-time audio data from parliamentary sessions, transcribe recordings, and implement a multi-step editorial and approval process for parliamentary minutes. The presentation also covers customization efforts to localize metadata into Amharic and design improvements to suit local needs. The repository has been tested and is now live, with a significant number of documents uploaded. The insights will be useful for developers, librarians, and decision-makers looking to expand repositories into new contexts.