Living independently of mainstream institutions, digital community archives and digital humanities collections confront systemic barriers to medium-and long-term viability. Their sustainability tends to be undermined by shifts in technologies, resources, and communities over time. Because these collections contain irreplaceable and invaluable evidence of communities and histories that are underrepresented in cultural institutions, their fragility compromises the completeness and equity of our collective digital heritage. Partnerships between institutions and community-based collections often founder over a lack of shared understanding: of the expertise each partner brings to the table, of the scope and extent of mutual commitments, and of what sustainability even entails for a given project. This paper reports preliminary outcomes of a case study of the Lakeland Digital Archive, exploring how Lakeland's community understands sustainability in the context of their digital archive, as part of a broader study of community-centered sustainability strategies for digital collections.

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The diversification of digital scholarship poses significant challenges to integrating non‐traditional products of humanities scholarship—ranging from digital editions and linked data aggregations to software and virtual environments—into established ecosystems for sustaining and preserving scholarly communication. Without a strong understanding of the variety of forms of digital scholarship, it is difficult to establish broadly useful or systematic (and therefore sustainable) approaches to managing diverse digital products throughout their lifecycles. This study illuminates one region of the landscape of digital humanities scholarship by identifying and characterizing different types of scholar‐generated digital collections which make different contributions to scholarship. Through formal typological analysis of approximately 200 scholar‐generated digital humanities research collections, this study offers conceptual handles for understanding the principal purposes and contributions of digital collections, and the implications for evaluation, sustainment, and preservation of digital scholarship.

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