Digital arts and humanities have the potential to positively impact the quality of human life, civic engagement and public value. However, this potential can only be realised if researchers can collaborate and engage with each other and society in a secure and trustworthy manner. This is where identity management systems, such as Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAI), come in.

AAI is a set of software systems that help users easily login to services. It enables single sign-on (SSO), whereby users authenticate once when connecting to the first application and are then automatically authenticated for all other federated applications they wish to use. It also ensures that access to resources is controlled and secure where necessary (e.g. sensitive datasets or licensed resources), and is compliant with security and ethical requirements. In the context of digital humanities and arts, AAI is critical for enabling researchers to collaborate on projects, share resources and engage with each other and society.

However, implementing AAI for a trustworthy collaboration framework can be challenging. This is where the AARC Compendium (Short et al., 2026) comes in. The AARC Compendium is an introductory guide to implementing federated identity management for research collaborations. Based on the AARC Blueprint Architecture (AARC BPA, 2019), the Compendium provides a practical overview of how to design, implement, and operate an AAI. It also covers various topics including technical requirements, security, data protection and policy-related issues.

As researchers, we value collaboration, openness, and inclusivity. The AARC Compendium, which itself was developed collaboratively (AARC-TREE, 2025), reflects these values by providing a framework for building trustworthy digital infrastructures that support our scholarship.

Why should Research Communities invest in AARC Compliance?

For DARIAH, investing in AARC-compliant AAI is a strategic step to strengthen its role within the European and international research ecosystem. By following the AARC Blueprint, research communities can establish robust and trustworthy identity management systems, can enable secure and seamless collaboration, as well as grant access to shared resources and services.

DARIAH is influencing the next phase of AARC compliance through its involvement in the current AARC TREE project (AARC Technical Revision to Enhance Effectiveness) (AARC-TREE, 2026), which aims to stimulate the uptake of federated access management. This work lays the foundation for AAIs to become compatible with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) (Kanellopoulos et al., 2025). AARC-compliant AAIs are a prerequisite for this.

Finally, we reiterate that infrastructures of engagement need to be designed to support open, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable platforms for research and scholarship. They should enable researchers to collaborate and engage with each other and with society in a secure and trustworthy manner. To achieve this, research collaborations should prioritise using an AARC-compliant AAI as an essential cornerstone of their infrastructure from the outset. The DARIAH AAI (Kálmán et al., 2025; DARIAH-AAI, 2025) can be a good basis for this.

Engaged digital humanities is often discussed in terms of participatory formats such as citizen science, crowdsourcing and co-creation projects. While these are vital, they capture only one dimension of engagement. This paper argues that engagement is also, and crucially, a matter of infrastructural design: of how institutions, resources, tools and expertise are organized to support sustained interaction between research, memory institutions and society.

Digital humanities infrastructures play a critical and under-examined role in shaping how research connects with society because they function as integrative systems. They determine how institutions work together, how cultural data is structured and accessed, and when and where questions of public use, responsibility, and inclusion are addressed. These decisions shape engagement long before any public-facing project begins.

The paper offers a situated reflection on what it means to build infrastructures of engagement in a small national context, drawing on the experience of the Icelandic Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts (MSHL/CDHA). MSHL brings together fifteen highly heterogeneous partner institutions, spanning universities, national and local museums, archives, libraries and media organizations. This breadth is unusual even by European digital humanities standards and has enabled collaboration across institutions with very different mandates.

Rather than focusing on individual projects, this paper examines MSHL itself as an engagement infrastructure: a coordinating layer that connects institutional ecosystems, stabilizes collaboration, and aligns research practices with public-facing cultural work. From this experience, we distill a set of transferable design principles for engaged digital humanities infrastructures.

First, engagement benefits from heterogeneous institutional design. Bringing together institutions with fundamentally different mandates (research, preservation, mediation, broadcasting, education) creates conditions for hybridity, where disciplinary, technical and cultural practices for public engagement are co-developed rather than aligned post hoc.

Second, engagement depends on shared infrastructure, not only shared goals. Pooling equipment, platforms and expertise lowers institutional boundaries and turns collaboration into routine practice. This is visible in the shared operation of high-resolution digitization equipment between Reykjavík City Museum, the National Museum and the University Hospital, where the same infrastructure supports very different collections and audiences. It is also evident in the VR equipment initially developed in a Nordplus project and subsequently made available more broadly through MSHL’s mediation, allowing students and partners to reuse tools beyond the original project context.

Third, sustained engagement requires dedicated coordinating entities. Durable centers and networks are necessary to mediate between institutional cultures, maintain infrastructures and carry relationships beyond individual funding cycles. This is evident in the ongoing development of a national name authority register linking people and places across institutions.

The Icelandic case is not presented as a model to replicate, but as a lens that makes infrastructural dynamics unusually visible due to the small scale of the institutional landscape. The paper contributes concrete design insights to current discussions on infrastructures of engagement; it argues that if digital humanities is to operate “with and for society”, engagement must be conceived not only as participation, but as a property of how research infrastructures themselves are built.

The H2IOSC Marketplace is a federated access layer designed to expose, manage, and operate research services and digital resources from the Italian nodes of four European research infrastructures — OPERAS, DARIAH, CLARIN, and E-RIHS — through a single, coherent Marketplace. The platform combines a public-facing environment for discovery and access with a Back-Office supporting infrastructure-level governance, curation, and operational configuration.
A key scientific and technical contribution of the H2IOSC Marketplace lies in enabling cross-infrastructure service orchestration as a first-class capability, formalized early in the project (Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14187534). In this architecture, WSO2 API Manager acts as the API management control plane at Marketplace level, governing service/API lifecycle, access, and policy enforcement.
Moreover, WSO2 Micro Integrator is used to implement executable orchestration projects (workflows) that integrate heterogeneous services and resources into reproducible, shareable research processes.
This approach is explicitly based on an orchestration model, where the Marketplace serves as the central coordination layer for workflow execution and service invocation across multiple infrastructure domains.
Interoperability and catalogue coherence are achieved by combining OAI-PMH harvesting with authenticated REST interfaces, using a controlled data model and curated vocabularies to maintain semantic consistency.
A deliberate operational choice prioritises catalogue consistency by discouraging manual creation of items in favour of harvested/imported records, mitigating the risk of persisting obsolete or non-existing services over time; controlled vocabularies are updated via managed file imports to ensure curated alignment. Identity and access management are implemented via a dedicated Keycloak instance for the Marketplace, which can be federated with external authentication services. This configuration enables autonomous user administration and token handling needed for protected service orchestration, while remaining compatible with federated identity constraints.
By bringing together, in a single operational framework, services originating from four distinct European research infrastructures and by treating orchestration as a native Marketplace capability — implemented through a governance layer (WSO2 API Manager) and executable orchestration projects (WSO2 Micro Integrator) — the H2IOSC Marketplace advances a reusable model for cross-infrastructure Digital Humanities workflows. The resulting approach supports a shared, infrastructure-agnostic entry point for discovery, controlled access, and workflow-driven reuse of services and resources, enabling research processes that are more interoperable, reproducible, and shareable across institutional and infrastructural boundaries.

The innovation landscape is changing. Traditionally, the concept was dominated by STEM-centric models focused primarily on technological inventions. However, innovation is increasingly recognized as a process where value is created through the recombination of existing knowledge to address complex societal, cultural, and policy challenges. Within this framework, digital social sciences, arts, and humanities are uniquely equipped to bridge the gaps between technological advancements and social or cultural needs. By utilizing technology to innovate data use and test solutions, SSH can drive meaningful change.

The Evolution of Research Infrastructures

To fully realize this potential, contemporary SSH research infrastructures must transform into "infrastructures of engagement". This transformation fosters real-world applications of SSH knowledge. A central pillar of this effort is the development of specialized innovation centers – entities responsible for innovation management that engage diverse stakeholders in designing and testing solutions to real-world challenges. The OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for SSH) consortium has adopted this approach by establishing its Innovation Lab as a strategic mechanism for mission-driven innovation.

Strategic Establishment and Advanced Ecosystem

As OPERAS transitions toward its legal status as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), the Innovation Lab will serve as its innovation center. Starting from 2026 the Lab will be hosted at the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PCSS; formerly PSNC) in Poland. This allows the Lab to leverage a world-class technical and collaboration ecosystem. Key resources available through the PCSS headquarters include:

• High-Performance Computing (HPC): Providing the power for data-intensive research.

• PIAST-AI Factory: Offering computing resources.

• HERIFORGE Excellence Hub: A dedicated space for R&D collaboration in cultural heritage.

• Living Labs and EDIHs: Facilitating direct interaction between researchers and the broader European innovation landscape.

A Specialized Two-Track Support Framework

The Lab's support structure is divided into two distinct tracks, each tailored to different aspects of applied SSH research:

1. Scholarly Communication Services: This track focuses on the scholarly publishing ecosystem. It aims to refine digital services, such as open-access workflows and discovery platforms, to enhance the quality and reuse of research.

2. SSH Impact: This track is dedicated to strengthening the applicability of research results beyond academia. It facilitates knowledge transfer between researchers and industry, NGOs, and policymakers.

Direct Support for SSH Innovators

To bridge the gap between research and application, the Lab will issue "calls for engagement" offering specialized support:

• SSH Gateway to AI Factories: Providing researchers with access to computing infrastructure and GPU resources for prototyping R&D projects.

• Data Science Support: Offering expert guidance in data-based methods to uncover insights from complex datasets.

• Service Design & Improvement: Delivering UX/UI support and software quality enhancements to improve the usability of SSH services.

Through these initiatives, the OPERAS Innovation Lab seeks to engage a community striving to maximize the societal impact of the SSH. Through this paper, we will aim to provoke discussion about the SSH community needs and adapt the Lab’s service offer.