involvedcollecting

Involvedcollecting is an approach to collecting that emphasizes active participation by people and communities connected to the items or data being gathered. Rather than treating collections as the sole product of a collector’s decisions, involvedcollecting seeks to share control, responsibilities, and benefits with source communities, researchers, museums, libraries, or other stakeholders. The term has emerged in discussions of participatory museum practices, archival ethics, and data stewardship, and can apply to physical artifacts, digital assets, or knowledge records.

Core practices include forming participatory governance structures such as community advisory boards; co-curation, where community input helps determine which items are collected and how they are described; consent processes that address rights over representation, sacred materials, and ownership; and transparent decision-making about collection scope, access, and preservation. Methods also include crowd-sourced input, collaborative annotation, and open licensing or shared stewardship agreements.

Contexts and applications: involvedcollecting is used in museums seeking to decolonize displays, in indigenous and local heritage projects, in academic archives, and in digital repositories that aim to balance openness with community rights. Benefits include more accurate representations, enhanced legitimacy, and new forms of knowledge exchange, as well as potential pathways for repatriation, benefit-sharing, and community capacity-building. Challenges include navigating diverse stakeholder interests, legal and ethical constraints, resource demands, and the risk of tokenism if power is not truly shared.

See also: co-curation, participatory archiving, community archives, decolonization of museums, crowdsourcing.