Scholarly resources in the humanities face significant discoverability challenges as they are scattered across diverse catalogues, repositories and funding databases, which have varying standards and limited interoperability. This presentation examines the Text+ Registry as an example of how digital infrastructures can be designed to encourage open, inclusive and collaborative engagement across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Through its distinctive layering approach and community-driven curation model, the Registry shows how research infrastructures act as catalysts for sustainable scholarly collaboration and improved public access to humanities resources.

The Registry is a unified meta-cataloguing system developed within Text+, a consortium of Germany's National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), to address the aforementioned fragmentation. Thanks to its innovative design, the Registry aggregates metadata from multiple authoritative sources, enabling distributed enrichment by domain experts and researchers beyond the circle of the consortium. Using concrete examples from the field of scholarly editions, we will demonstrate how the Registry can bridge the gap between existing catalogues, such as AGATE (the current research information system (CRIS)) for the German Academies' Programme containing information on projects funded since 1979), and specialised inventories, such as Patrick Sahle’s catalogue (SDE).

The presentation will demonstrate how the Registry's metamodelling approach accommodates diverse resource types flexibly while maintaining semantic consistency through information layering and authority data integration (cf. Gradl et al. 2025). Furthermore, we will examine how low-barrier authentication mechanisms enable broad community participation in resource curation, transcending traditional boundaries. The Registry's approach to implementing the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) provides practical guidance for other infrastructure projects. Rather than viewing FAIR compliance as primarily a technical challenge, the Registry illustrates how community participation can facilitate metadata enrichment through authority data, vocabulary integration, and provenance preservation.

The Registry's bidirectional data exchange capabilities exemplify sustainable infrastructure design: it both harvests metadata from existing systems and provisions enriched data to domain-specific services such as the PhilFinder provided by the Specialized Information Service Philosophy (cf. Fruth et al. 2025). Integration with complementary infrastructures, including an instance of the Research Software Directory or the SSH Open Marketplace as well as further planned use cases in NFDI and beyond, positions the Registry within broader European research infrastructure initiatives. These interconnections demonstrate how national infrastructure components contribute to transnational collaborative frameworks.

Insights gained from workflows for data ingestion, quality assurance, and collaborative curation will be shared. Hence, the paper addresses the 2026 conference theme of ‘Infrastructures of Engagement’: The Text+ Registry prioritises openness through accessible authentication, fosters collaboration through distributed curation, ensures inclusivity by integrating resources regardless of institutional origin, and promotes sustainability through the reuse of existing standards and technologies. In doing so, it exemplifies how digital infrastructure can facilitate meaningful engagement between researchers, institutions and the wider public sphere. The presentation will also address critical questions regarding infrastructure sustainability and community engagement. How can research infrastructures balance centralised coordination with distributed curation? Which technical systems enable flexible evolution while maintaining data quality? How can systems be designed to serve both specialised research communities and other potential audiences?