ROSSIO is the leading infrastructure for Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities in Portugal and holds over 9 million records on Portuguese-language cultural heritage from 25 Portuguese and 1 Brazilian institutions. It has been part of the National Roadmap of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Interest (RNIE) since 2014, and was funded by public and European funds between 2018 and 2022 (Silva et al. 2022).

The need to create and maintain research infrastructures that make digital resources generated by the digitization efforts of many institutions and projects, over the last thirty years, more accessible and usable has been advocated, at least, since the turn of the second decade of this century. (Ell e Hughes 2013; Speck e Links 2013). In Europe, this coincided with the creation of several European infrastructures, such as CLARIN or DARIAH, for example (Branco et al. 2025; Constantopoulos et al. 2008). But this effort had already been developed in thematic digital infrastructures since the previous decade, as was the case with ARIADNE (Meghini et al. 2017) or Perseids (Almas 2017), for instance. These infrastructures were considered fundamental for the development of research in all scientific areas, and the exponential growth of available data in recent decades, as well as the increasing digital integration of society and academia, or the future challenges of Artificial Intelligence, make their role increasingly essential. (Bellini e Degl’Innocenti 2024; Rißler-Pipka et al. 2023; Iannace 2023; Barbot et al. 2024).

The ROSSIO Infrastructure can be a case study within the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, having faced institutional, funding, and technological challenges since 2014 that may indicate it as a good guide for the implementation and resilience necessary for the maintenance of such infrastructures (Bellini e Degl’Innocenti 2024). These challenges stemmed from the thematic, geographic, and institutional expansion that ROSSIO underwent in its initial years of development: it went from a network focused on architectural collections in institutions located in Lisbon, to a metadata aggregator of millions of records on Portuguese-language cultural heritage deposited in decentralized institutions spread throughout the country. It was a challenge to find consensus and establish dialogue with, and among, institutions overseen by multiple ministries (culture, education and research, finance, internal administration, defense, foreign affairs), but also private and even international institutions, with local, regional, and national scales of intervention. Technical challenges were overcome in aggregating, curating, and making available datasets originating from archival and memory records on Portuguese-language cultural heritage, as well as research results. Another challenge arises from the diversity and richness of this data, which, in a very summarized way, encompasses historical documentation from the 9th century to the present day and cultural records of multiple origins, typologies, and formats: cartography, plans, images (engravings, paintings, photographs, etc.), moving images, sounds, publications, posters, private collections, newspapers, old books, etc. Finally, strategies were defined to address the lack of funding for the infrastructure since 2022, combining the provision of specialized human resources by a university and the maintenance of the technological infrastructure by the national archives.