This paper presents a pioneering attempt in digital humanities to create a digital archive entirely dedicated to Chinese calligraphy and contemporary arts, making WenDAng – WRITE Digital Archive¹ among the first of its kind worldwide, the first in Europe of Chinese contemporary art, and the first in Italy dedicated to Chinese studies. One of its core responsibilities lies in assuring ethical and accurate representation and dissemination of data. By designing an open-source infrastructure, the project seeks to acquaint global audiences with this specific part of Chinese cultural heritage.

The archive is being constructed using a dedicated ontology² and thesaurus³, developed in close collaboration with the domain experts. Their expertise has been invaluable in ensuring that the archive reflects cultural authenticity and scholarly precision. This collaborative process exemplifies engaged scholarship: knowledge is co-created through dialogue and collaboration between experts in Chinese culture, language, arts, calligraphy, digital humanities, and information technologies. Such infrastructures, grounded in engagement, can greatly enhance the quality of research while opening it to wider publics.

Other than safeguarding cultural heritage, this project addresses the broader role of digital infrastructures as tools that can support education, research, and the representation of less familiar cultural practices within intercultural dialogue. In fact, digital archives are not neutral repositories, but rather narrators of culture. The WenDAng archive will be a place where Chinese contemporary calligraphy can be engaged with, studied, and valued, hence adding up to diversity and fostering inclusion.

Digital archives built on Linked Open Data and Semantic Web principles can sometimes face the challenge of translating technical complexity into accessible user experiences. The WenDang archive addresses this by designing an interface that is both semantically rigorous and intuitive, enabling engagement not only from digital humanities experts, but from diverse publics as well. This will ensure that the results of research are not confined to academic circles but shared widely.

Moreover, this project addresses the challenge of resilience in digital semantic infrastructures. Cultural heritage must be preserved not only for current audiences but also for future generations, and the role of semantic technologies, interoperable standards, and adherence to FAIR principles is key to ensure long-term preservation.

In sum, the WenDAng archive exemplifies how digital archives can serve as infrastructures of engagement. It preserves cultural heritage, empowers domain experts, and opens new perspectives on less known practices. By situating Chinese contemporary calligraphy in dialogue with digital humanities, the project demonstrates how these infrastructures can generate public value and foster intercultural understanding.

1) https://wendang-project.github.io/documentation/

2) https://w3id.org/write/ontology

3) https://w3id.org/write/thesaurus

The Mmmonk project is a collaborative initiative providing open access to over 700 medieval manuscripts from four dissolved abbeys, now dispersed across multiple libraries and archives. From its inception, Mmmonk has been grounded in broad cooperation and a structural engagement with diverse audiences. The project was initiated as a partnership between a public library (Bruges), a university library (Ghent), and two religious institutions (Ghent Diocese and the Major Seminary of Bruges), each bringing different strengths and perspectives. In line with the public mission of Bruges Public Library (project lead), Mmmonk is explicitly designed to serve multiple user groups, from toddlers to theologians. Both the technical infrastructure and content of the platform were developed in close collaboration with a wide range of contributors, such as scholars, the IIIF community, primary school teachers, collection managers, and young artists. The diverse forms of collaboration and public engagement were conceived not as an afterthought but as core elements of the project. The outcomes include:

• virtual exhibitions made by scholars from Ghent University, KU Leuven and Columbia University, as well as by their students, based on original research;
• learning scenarios co-created with primary school teachers;
• videos ‘Medieval Manuscripts Through Children’s Eyes’;
• in-depth dossiers written by collection managers, based on original research;
• a proof of concept for IIIF-based visualisation of annotations on complex materials, based on a needs survey of potential end-users, created as input for future developments by IIIF experts;
• a (physical) art exhibition and panel discussion by artists inspired by the manuscripts;
• the ongoing annual Mmmonk School webinars on medieval books, co-hosted by the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (Ghent University), reaching new and large audiences across the globe;
• the ongoing international workshops for end-users on the advantages of IIIF images.

An underlying goal of Mmmonk is to advance the use of IIIF and provide critical end-user input for further development by the tech community.

• The website was conceived as a practical example of the potential of IIIF and provides a replicable model for collection building initiatives.
• For the partner institutions, the project provided a testing ground to explore sustainable strategies for the long-term management of their manuscript collections.
• The end-users’ proof of concept for complex annotations was picked up by developers as input for further improvement of viewers and tools.
• The workshop on the use of IIIF images continues to support skills development among end-users.
• The project funded improvements to a virtual exhibition tool to allow visitors to interact with the materials (e.g., in the classroom).

Metadata and image aggregation through IIIF manifests provided the additional advantage of freeing up valuable time and resources for user mediation and participation.

The convergence of heritage professionals, researchers, teachers, developers and artists has been beneficial in many ways, generating a shared mission, high-quality and diverse content, open access collections, new networks, and sustained engagement. The presentation will also highlight the importance of strategically designed gateways to introduce new and broader audiences to the collections (“Come for the free webinars/workshops, stay for the rich datasets”).

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.

While digital scholarly resources are frequently considered as targeted to domain experts, the manuscript database Bibliotheca Legum (BL) and the 'Edition of the Frankish Capitularies' (Capitularia), demonstrate how such ventures can successfully reach communities beyond their immediate scope. Though the two arose under strikingly different parameters, these closely linked projects transform medieval legal sources into accessible, interconnected resources that serve both scholarly research and teaching purposes.

Capitularia has received funding by the German Academies' Programme since 2014, working towards a hybrid edition of capitularies – central legal sources of the European Middle Ages (cf. Kaschke 2019). By contrast, the BL began in 2012 as a simple Word file compiling data on manuscripts preserving the so-called leges, gradually maturing into a manuscript database documenting the tradition and transmission of secular law texts in the Frankish realm (cf. Schulz/Trump 2018). Notwithstanding these divergent origins, both projects have deliberately pursued to complement each other and create synergies.

Their joint participation the Databases of Early Latin Manuscripts (DELM) network illustrates how collaborative frameworks can create added value extending beyond individual project goals. Both BL and Capitularia feed into the DELM Lookup Service, giving researchers unified access to otherwise dispersed information. Where efforts to build standardised authority data for Latin manuscripts for Latin manuscripts have stalled, DELM introduced a straightforward reference system based on Bischoff's 'Katalog' (Bischoff 1998–2014) and the 'Codices Latini Antiquiores' (Lowe 1934–1971), enabling cross-platform linkage between datasets. Both projects have also incorporated identifiers from the German 'Handschriftenportal', to include those in their TEI-XML files. This approach ensures manuscripts can be found across multiple platforms and facilitates integration also with evolving infrastructures and services in the future.

The projects' networking extends well beyond technical alignment. Through the Academies' Programme, Capitularia maintains ties with other long-term scholarly projects, enabling ongoing exchange about sustainability, technology choices, and editorial practice. Its blog series 'From the engine room' enacts a commitment to open science communication by sharing decisions about infrastructure and methodology with a broader readership. Other series, such as 'Manuscript of the Month', bring individual manuscripts or texts to life for general audiences, rendering codicological observations into accessible accounts of medieval legal culture. Integration into university teaching brings students into direct contact with the (digital) methodologies employed. By participating in specialised training events, such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica Autumn Academy on Early Medieval Law, the staff members strive to complement traditional training in historical auxiliary sciences.

The BL's evolution demonstrates that digital resources need not begin with extensive funding to grow into valuable research tools. Capitularia's experience shows systematic long-term planning while revealing challenges of adapting to changing standards.

By drawing on one another's experiences and participating jointly in wider networks, both projects have achieved a degree of interoperability and reach that would be unattainable in isolation. This talk highlights concrete examples of productive collaboration, networking, and outreach, while acknowledging the ongoing difficulty of meeting varied demands within constrained resources.