Unlocking Southeast Asia’s digital heritage: discovery, partnerships, and engagement

Abstract

NUS Libraries’ digitisation and digital stewardship programme expands open access to rare and unique Southeast Asian materials while ensuring long-term usability, trustworthiness, and preservation. This paper traces the shift from ad-hoc digitisation to a coordinated, standards-based programme anchored by Digital Gems, NUS Libraries’ public gateway to digitised special collections. It argues that metadata is the operational backbone linking workflows, multilingual description and authority control, rights and ethics review, interoperability (stable identifiers, APIs, OAI-PMH harvesting), user experience, aggregation, and preservation actions. The paper also examines partnership models – loan-and-return digitisation with rights holders and co-creation with NUS units and regional collaborators – that responsibly expand collections and enrich context. Finally, it shows how engagement through teaching, research, exhibitions, and outreach moves collections from “available” to “used,” generating educational and scholarly impact and encouraging further donations. It concludes with practical lessons: align discovery with preservation, adopt community standards, design for interoperability, foreground rights and ethics, and invest in partnerships and outreach to sustain living digital heritage.