Lessons in Digital Stewardship from the AACAT-1870 Founding Graduate Cohort

As digital archives tools continue to evolve, many archival conversations center on technology rather than the communities whose histories these systems are meant to preserve. This presentation reflects on what it means to “hit reset” by re-centering human experience, community authority, and grassroots stewardship within digital archival practice.

Drawing on the development of the African American Community Archives Theory (AACAT-1870) course and cohort model, this talk highlights how the founding graduate cohort engaged digital stewardship concepts while documenting and preserving community histories. Participants worked with materials such as family photographs, community records, digitized documents, and born-digital files—often without the infrastructure typically available in institutional archives.

Rather than beginning with complex digital preservation systems, this approach begins with community priorities: protecting family archives, documenting local histories, and ensuring long-term access for descendant communities.

This presentation shares lessons learned from building a community-based archival training model that emphasizes accessibility, sustainability, and cultural stewardship, offering a human-centered framework that expands participation in digital preservation practice.This talk introduces Fedora 7.x, the most recent major version of the software. This release focuses on intentional prioritization, rather than expanding functionality. The goal was to modernize the platform’s technical foundation, upgrading over 40 dependency libraries. These changes address long-term security concerns and reduce technical debt.
The story of Fedora 7.x is one that will resonate with many open-source communities. How we reallocated limited resources toward invisible but essential maintenance, ensuring that institutions can continue to trust the infrastructure that underpins their preservation workflows. This presentation will showcase how open-source communities can, and should, pause to reassess priorities and move forward with intention.

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