2025 年 8 巻 1 号 p. 27-40
Community-driven cultural heritage archives are on the rise, yet face persistent challenges in sustainability, particularly when transitioning from physical to digital formats. This is especially the case for sister city association projects, which are often volunteer-led and both preserve and serve multilingual and transnational communities. This article examines the Maine–Aomori Printmaking Society (MAPS) Online Archive & Repository as a case study of a grassroots, transnational arts initiative preserved through a “digital twin” using the open-source platform CollectionBuilder. The intent of the study is to explore an accessible, low barrier of entry digital preservation tool that is metadata-driven, customizable, and multilingual, enabling sister cities to maintain control over their community cultural heritage without the need for institutional support. Long-term stewardship capabilities of CollectionBuilder and similar web-based platforms as community archival tools are assessed, with special consideration to volunteer-based knowledge transfer and technical accessibility in regards to community project autonomy. The MAPS Online Archive & Repository demonstrates the potential of digital humanities tools to grant sister cities autonomy, support cross-cultural heritage exchange, and create digital twins that broaden the reach of community cultural heritage projects active on the ground.
Even as community-driven archives increasingly transition from physical to digital formats, their sustainability remains precarious. The Digital Preservation Coalition (2024a) has included “community-generated content” among its “critically endangered” digital materials since 2019, citing the lack of ongoing institutional support and preservation planning and the reliance on volunteer-dependent systems as major threats. A variety of sustainable methods and practices are needed to promote and encourage the development of community-driven and community-backed archives. Flinn (2007, p.153) describes such archives as being born from “the grassroots activities of documenting, recording, and exploring community heritage in which community participation, control, and ownership are essential.” Community-driven collections are increasingly developing their own archives without institutional funding in order to maintain ownership and decision-making capabilities over their cultural heritage, relying on a growing number of accessible, open-source web tools to balance limited resources (Caswell 2021; Digital Preservation Coalition 2024b; Flinn et al. 2009). An online archive for a physical community cultural heritage collection can essentially serve as a “digital twin” (Unity Technologies 2025)—a virtual replica of a physical object or system—that can mirror the unique circumstances represented by grassroots heritage collections and their stakeholders, including regional connections, multilingualism, and cultural heritage objects created within and for the community itself. These source collections are informed by the communal memory of their creators, making the digital twinning process an exploratory one to not only meet the community’s capacity needs but also to identify which platforms best suit the online mediation of their cultural heritage. The Maine–Aomori Printmaking Society (MAPS) Online Archive & Repository represents one such community-driven effort to safeguard a grassroots transnational arts initiative through the creation of a digital heritage twin of the MAPS program, built using open-source digital humanities infrastructure, culturally responsive metadata, and multilingual access to ensure long-term visibility and stewardship.1
The MAPS program was a grassroots, transnational printmaking exchange and exhibition program, operating from autumn 2015 through 2020 as a visual culture exchange initiative of the Maine–Aomori sister-state relationship. The sister-state relationship—or sister-city, sister-county, or “twin-town” relationship—is a broad-based, long-term partnership between two communities in two countries, officially recognized after the highest elected or appointed official from each community signs off on an agreement for the two communities to become “sisters” (Sister Cities International, n.d.). The MAPS project exchanged and exhibited artworks by professional printmakers working in the State of Maine (United States) and Aomori prefecture (Japan), connecting the two disparate regions through artistic creation, reception, and community programming. The five-year MAPS program ran annually and eventually accumulated over 240 artworks and other memorabilia in its twin collection, evenly divided between Aomori and Maine. The prints in the collection range from woodblock prints, lithography, screenprints, chine collé, etchings, and various relief printing formats.
The project began as a collaboration between Jiro Ono, Director of the Munakata Shikō Museum of Art in Aomori City, and Jeff Badger, Co-Chair of the Department of Art at Southern Maine Community College and President of the nonprofit Friends of Aomori (n.d.) organization. The two developed a blueprint for what would transition from a one-time cultural exchange event to an annual cultural exchange initiative under the regions’ sister banner: 20 prints by 20 artists, 10 from Maine and 10 from Aomori, were to be exchanged and exhibited to the public in both locales. MAPS was a multi-tiered project, aimed at making extensive connections within and between the artist communities of Maine and Aomori through artist contributions, exhibitions, and artist residencies. The Consulate General of Japan in Boston supported the artist residency at Pickwick Press in Portland featuring five of the participating artists from Aomori, with the nearby Maine College of Art hosting woodblock printmaking workshops for art students.2 The MAPS project evolved from there, extending its reach through traveling exhibitions to various venues in communities throughout Maine and Aomori; reciprocating the artist residency, sending five Maine artists abroad to partake in community arts programming in Aomori City; and introducing “Hashi” (橋)— a children’s printmaking exchange program conducted between Maine and Aomori schools—in 2018, with its inaugural exhibit held at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine in Portland the same year. In 2020, the MAPS program turned digital when it partnered with the Tides Institute to create a digital exhibition for the prints exchanged during the COVID-19 pandemic. After five years of operation, the MAPS program ended after its digital run in 2020, although the Hashi program continues to this day with the ongoing support of the Aomori Morning Rotary Club and its President, Dr. Tadashi Suzuki; current Friends of Aomori President, Lynda McCann-Olson; and area teachers in Maine and Japan.3
The MAPS project was born from a growing effort to revitalize the regional sister connection and widen the integration opportunities for community members to learn about and get involved with the citizen-led initiative, one that is widely shared in community-driven digital archives since they first appeared on the web (Caswell et al. 2017). Such efforts in the digital humanities to democratize cultural heritage preservation have surged in recent years. Local actors themselves participate in and determine the scope, governance, and preservation priorities in community archives, and as Poole (2020, p.658) argues, the rise in community-led digital archives reflects a shift toward democratic, community-defined stewardship models: Community archives “puncture common misconceptions of archives as objective and neutral; further, they enable the challenging of archives as longstanding bastions of governmental and bureaucratic power, authority, and control.” This method of preservation resonates well with the sister model, which is rooted in and largely operates through citizen-led diplomacy and is shaped according to the unique values and priorities of each participating community. While digital preservation and online open access platforms can address funding concerns commonly experienced by these programs, they ultimately continue their legacy—both in broad institutional purpose and in their respective cultural activities—through digital community archives. The MAPS program’s move from a physical collection to a digital platform incorporated online cultural heritage into the Maine–Aomori connection’s repertoire of transcultural programming methods. Furthermore, this digital twin’s cataloguing and distribution as online cultural heritage can achieve broader access for both organizers and viewers, synchronous availability, and a hybrid storage strategy for a place-based collection. In the words of Holloway (2022, p.2), there is “creative, empowering, and generative potential of digital humanities to foster and sustain collaborative preservation work and push against the boundaries of how place-based heritage is or could be defined.” Handing over the Maine-based MAPS collection to a local cultural institution for preservation purposes in a similar fashion to its sister collection in Japan was discussed by its organizers but ultimately shelved. MAPS, while affiliated with the Maine–Aomori Sister State, was a grassroots development initiative, a community-based effort to expand the Maine–Aomori community scope to the arts communities, driven and maintained by community members (i.e., its stakeholders). While the Digital Preservation Coalition (2024a) maintains that the lack of institutional support and preservation planning these institutional archives can provide is detrimental to community archives’ survival, Poole (2020) notes that turning over a community archive to an institution can unintentionally sever its connection to the community that created it:
Community archives break with traditional archives in the diversity of stakeholders involved and the types of materials considered preservation worthy… community archives respect and embrace different types of work expertise: they blur or even elide distinctions among archivists, curators, collectors, creators, contributors, subjects, volunteers, activists, community members, and researchers… Hence, they may encourage new or novel collaborations and partnerships. (p.659)
Exchange programming affiliated with the Maine–Aomori sister-state association had predominantly been educational exchanges between schools or political delegations since the association’s inception in 1994. The MAPS program aimed to involve the artist communities of Maine and Aomori, extending its reach to more community members through both direct exchange methods and the reception and preservation of exchanged artworks. As with most volunteer endeavors, the project relied heavily on the expertise and generosity of community members with a personal interest in supporting the Maine–Aomori community, including volunteer interpreters, professional framers providing services at no cost or at-cost rates, gallery staff, community venues lending space for exhibitions and associated community events, students, and artists alike.
The use of visual culture—art, objects, and media in which people communicate and create meaning—was of special interest to the organizers, recognizing that visual culture represents “the tangible, or visible, expressions by a people, a state or a civilization, and collectively describes the characteristics of that body as a whole” (Schleimer 2008). Visual culture exchange could expand the communicative abilities within the Maine–Aomori sister state, considering the language barrier between the two regions. In Maine, 94% of the population speak English as their primary language, while 6% speak another language. The most common non-English language spoken in Maine is French, followed by Spanish and Chinese.4 Aomori can be considered a monolinguistic region, albeit with several dialects distinct from standard spoken Japanese, including Tsugaru, Nanbu, and Shimokita dialects (Aomori Tourism, n.d.). The stark linguistic difference presents difficulties for community-building within Maine–Aomori sister-state initiatives. The MAPS program’s use of visual culture and collective making through residencies leveraged the universal language of visual art, providing a meaningful avenue for cross-cultural dialogue despite language barriers through visual culture.
At its core, the MAPS program is a collection of artworks exchanged in goodwill, as signs of “sisterhood.” It also consists of relics within the Maine–Aomori sister state that, once exhibited, return to the shelves, cupboards, or storage boxes in the homes of their respective stewards, the individuals active within the small community. For the first exhibition of MAPS at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, past members of the Friends of Aomori and citizens who had participated in Maine–Aomori student exchange programs in their youth brought cultural items to share with exhibition visitors, organizers, and visiting artists from Aomori.
One such item was a small Neputa float, a bulbous and fan-shaped paper float painted similarly to those featured in the historic Neputa summer festival in Hirosaki, Aomori. This particular mini float was constructed years before by students at Hall-Dale High School in Farmingdale, Maine, and kept in the house of their Japanese language teacher, Naoto Kobayashi. SPACE Gallery agreed to display the Neputa in its street-facing window during the art exhibition and then to return it to Mr. Kobayashi’s home once the exhibition finished. Since then, Mr. Kobayashi has retired from teaching and the Japanese language program no longer exists at the high school. The school’s US–Japan student exchange program was also cut during the COVID-19 pandemic and has yet to be reinstated.
The MAPS program’s first exhibition also included an illustrated children’s book, Hello From the Other Side of the World, a collaboration between Maine children’s book author and illustrator Scott Nash and Aomori-based illustrator Toshiki Sawada. The book, a prototype that was illustrated and narrated in a pen pal–like fashion between Nash and Sawada, each illustrating one of two deer on opposite sides of the world, who correspond with one another through sending messages in bottles. Sadly, the book was never finished owing to the sudden passing of Mr. Sawada.5 Mr. Nash presented the prototype at the exhibition, allowing visitors to see the incomplete collaboration. The book was returned to Mr. Nash upon the exhibit’s closing, with no plans for finishing it without his collaborator. The fate of this unfinished book echoes the precarity that community-led, people-to-people exchange initiatives like sister cities often face. They are fragile but enduring collaborative efforts: Even as individual contributors pass through or depart, the collaboration is carried forward by cultural heritage objects through communal intentions.
The relationship has experienced major changes on the Aomori side of the connection as well. For example, the Munakata Memorial Museum of Art permanently closed in March of 2024, relinquishing its art collection to the prefectural Aomori Museum of Art.6
Owing to the volunteer nature of the Maine-Aomori sister state’s organizing committees, it can be difficult to continue programs for long periods. While establishing new artistic collaborations incorporating the sister state’s mission of cultural diplomacy are still in process, programming is often in flux and instructed by the individual volunteers active in the sister state at a given time.
To keep MAPS in a physical-only state would invite its deterioration and loss over time; the idea of a digital twin through an online archive for MAPS, its contents, trajectory, and orbital objects thus stemmed from the desire to preserve them and their meaning for the long term in an accessible and instructional way. In a volunteer-led and -run organization, individuals often rotate in and out, and resources thus ebb and flow. Recording the program and its various contributions is one beneficial result of it being integrated into an online archive, with the capability of sharing an art exchange program blueprint and its possibilities to others looking to implement their own transnational arts initiative being another positive outcome. Furthermore, the shuttering of the project partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the project online in its final year through digital exhibitions, laying the groundwork for online implementation. The next steps were to determine an open-source online digital collection platform that best fit the project’s needs and reach.
At the end of the program’s five-year run, Friends of Aomori was in possession of over 120 large-scale artworks and other media, including books and exhibition memorabilia. The decision was made to digitally archive the MAPS program’s artworks, artists, exhibitions, venues, and history. The MAPS Online Archive & Repository project was individually pursued by the author, a co-organizer of the MAPS project during its tenure. As the project is affiliated with a 501(c) nonprofit entity and serves a transnational community, it was decided to seek out digital collection frameworks that met five specific criteria: (1) an open-source, metadata-driven content management system; (2) customizable gallery-style pages to maintain a digital exhibition feel; (3) the ability for the system to be locally hosted and maintained; (4) easy entry for those with minimal knowledge of coding languages and frameworks; and (5) multi-language display capabilities. Owing to the transnational nature of the collection and its volunteer-led management, criteria 4 and 5 were of special concern because the maintenance of the archive may over time pass between volunteer coordinators with varying abilities and because an English-only archive interface may exclude Japanese speakers within or interested in the community or fail to properly represent the bilingual nature of the community itself. As Dony et al. (2024) state, “open repositories and archives play an important role in defining and framing a knowledge-sharing and archiving praxis that improves the digital curation, management, and discoverability of multilingual or non-English content.” Furthermore, establishing multilingual metadata capabilities [supports] regional, multilingual, and community-oriented narratives (Konno 2020). Open access community archives such as those tied to sister cities present ideal opportunities for this practice within the field of digital humanities at large because of their community-oriented agenda, service, and ability to promote alternative circuits of publishing and knowledge dissemination from the bottom up. While the current project organizer has professional training in metadata and classification, future organizers may come to the project with a different set of skills. It was extremely important to consider the continuing management of such an archive when it is intrinsically tied to a rotating volunteer team. Choosing a platform with metadata built into its structure and establishing multilingual metadata capabilities early on can provide future project team members with workable examples already incorporated into the archive.
Several open-source content management platform options were initially considered for the MAPS digital archive, including Omeka, WordPress, Drupal, and CollectionBuilder. Omeka was a strong contender owing to its popularity and wide use in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector, and members of the project team had prior experience using it. Its support for metadata standards such as Dublin Core made the platform attractive for use by a small community archive like MAPS. However, despite offering built-in Dublin Core metadata functionality and plugins, Omeka’s interface could pose difficulties for individuals lacking familiarity with library science metadata standards. Although the MAPS project team currently has a volunteer contributor with knowledge of these standards, their participation in the project cannot be guaranteed for the long term. Consequently, the project’s capacity for longevity could be questionable if using Omeka. The MAPS project team also found that multi-language support in Omeka Classic was limited, as additional configuration or plugins in Omeka S would be required. Furthermore, the free version of Omeka is capped at 500 MB for media uploads and thus cannot accommodate the file size of the MAPS project’s collection, which intrinsically requires high-quality digital reproductions. Omeka also requires a hosted server environment and periodic updates, which poses long-term maintenance concerns, especially for a bare-bones volunteer-led project.
WordPress was considered because the Friends of Aomori organization was already using the platform for its own website. Members of the project team thus had some familiarity with its interface and plugin options, particularly those for galleries as a gallery page dedicated to the MAPS project had previously been part of the main WordPress-hosted site. WordPress and other content management systems often offer website development tools and hosting at no cost for 501(c) nonprofits, a perk many small community collections already utilize. WordPress can also toggle between languages through WPML or Polylang plugins. However, as previously noted during the initial attempt by the organization to develop a gallery page for MAPS through the platform, achieving the desired gallery-style page was difficult without premium plugins and custom CSS development required for the customization capabilities sought by the team. The financial and technical overhead costs would have been large hurdles for community-run archives. In the end, WordPress does not readily support metadata-driven digital collections. It is ultimately a blog-based platform, a model that falls short of the project’s archival needs. Drupal is a popular and powerful option, but its high setup and maintenance demands posed a significant barrier for the current and forecasted capacity of the MAPS Online Archive & Repository. Although it was ultimately not selected, Drupal ticked most of the project’s boxes by having robust multilingual capabilities and scalable content modeling and being highly customizable. However, Drupal is more well-suited for large institutions or projects with dedicated IT teams, and it may be too complex and too powerful for small grassroots volunteer-led archive teams to handle. Drupal requires backend configuration using Composer, and the need for a deep understanding of content architecture was a technical hurdle that was too high for the project team. Further, the small volunteer team could not guarantee its rotating members would be able to handle it in the future. For the MAPS Online Archive & Repository team, which consisted of a single designer and rotating contributors, Drupal’s demands were simply beyond the contributors’ capacity. Although Drupal is highly scalable with the potential for long-term web sustainability, a lighter, low-maintenance alternative was more practical and sustainable for the project.
CollectionBuilder, the platform that was ultimately chosen, is collaborative by design and was developed as “an experiment in ‘minimal computing,’” built on the premise of providing tutorials for “users to take complete ownership over the project and make their work open to the world” (2025), reflecting the needs of smaller grassroots archives operating outside of the GLAM sector. The platform provides premade, customizable templates for users to create digital collections and exhibit websites through GitHub, allowing for push/pull capabilities and live edits for team-led digital projects. The use of GitHub also allows digital collections stored on GitHub to either be kept private, accessible only by the individual creator, organization, or community, or made public via local hosting. The provided templates compile images and information sourced from a metadata file (CSV), a folder of supported digital media files (JPEG, PDF, MP3, PNG, etc.), and a configuration file for webpage setup. Templates include built-in interactive page elements such as maps, timelines, and search functions utilizing data sets determined in the metadata master file. Advanced technical skills are not required to set up a digital collection through the provided templates. The provided templates are complete enough to launch a digital archive with just a metadata file and collection files, or they can be completely customized to suit individual archives’ needs. CollectionBuilder’s simplified deployment model and use of the static web offered autonomy and lower infrastructure demands in contrast to the other considered platforms, making it a better fit for MAPS’ capacity for implementing an online presence. It also had built-in multilingual page templates and the ability for project teams to host their project locally, eliminating the need for institutional hosting and keeping control of the project within the community.
Perhaps the most important aspect of CollectionBuilder was its foundational use of CSV metadata for its webpage development on GitHub, which was deemed ideal. This feature inherently supported structured and customizable metadata classification, giving the platform a heightened ability to mirror the visual language of the MAPS art exhibitions and exchange program’s goals of sustainability, accessibility, and long-term community control.
A lightweight, metadata-driven platform such as CollectionBuilder, despite requiring a basic understanding of Git, markdown, and YAML, was deemed an appropriate choice by the project organizers owing to its low barrier of entry. However, it is important to note that CollectionBuilder’s customization does require some advanced skills and programming knowledge, and a true beginner may encounter some difficulty navigating the initial process of setting up the initial software required to get started. Long-term maintenance through CollectionBuilder is low cost, but it requires Git/GitHub knowledge from its users, who may change frequently in a volunteer-led team. This possibility posed some concerns for the project’s current volunteer team, who lacked substantial skills in these areas. However, during the project’s planning stage, it was discovered that the CollectionBuilder development team, composed of librarians at the University of Idaho in the United States, consistently facilitates an in-person course through the Canadian Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI, n.d.) as part of an institutional certification program, through which participants could develop and launch a digital archive under their instruction. This was the deciding factor for selecting CollectionBuilder as the project’s platform of choice. Table 1 summarizes the comparisons made between the four selected platforms considered for the MAPS Online Archive & Repository project.
| Feature | CollectionBuilder | Omeka | WordPress | Drupal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open source | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Metadata driven | ✅ CSV | ✅ Dublin Core | ➖ (plugins) | ✅ Schema.org |
| Multilingual support | Manual (via GitHub) | Omeka S with plugins | Plugin-based (e.g., WPML) | Built-in |
| Custom gallery pages | Yes (Jekyll + Markdown) | Via theme/module | Needs plugin or developer | Highly customizable |
| Server requirements | Minimal (GitHub Pages / Jekyll) | LAMP stack | LAMP or managed | LAMP/Composer |
| Technical barrier | Medium–high | Medium | Low | Medium–high |
| Scalability | Static—suited for small/midsize collections | High | High | Very high |
| Security model | GitHub-managed | Server dependent | Server dependent | Advanced roles and permissions |
This project followed a four-step implementation framework: (1) archival content collection and curation, (2) metadata development and classification, (3) user interface and iterative design during a digital humanities course, and (4) multilingual integration and community feedback. Each stage was documented and adapted based on user accessibility, technical feasibility, and preservation needs. Once CollectionBuilder was selected as the platform of choice, the author served as the principal agent for the digital archive’s development, participating in the CollectionBuilder summer course at DHSI 2024 and developing the digital collection metadata and archive in accordance with the course’s instructions. Selection of objects for inclusion in the MAPS digital archive benefitted from the items already being chronologically curated and labeled owing to the program’s traveling art exhibition model. High-quality photographs of each two-dimensional artwork featured in exhibitions throughout the program’s history were then taken, uploaded to a shareable Google drive, and organized in a spreadsheet prior to the course. Once compiled and labeled, they were formatted as a CSV file for upload to the CollectionBuilder platform. Decisions surrounding the archive’s metadata were particularly difficult, considering the archive would become a digital twin of a grassroots, bilingual, sororal, and cross-cultural community art exchange program. There was an inherent risk of the archive failing to reflect the relational, bilingual, and community-centered nature of the collection. Metadata development and classification criteria were planned using two principles: the FAIR guiding principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) and the CARE guiding principles (Carroll et al. 2021). The FAIR principles, guidelines aimed at improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse of digital assets, are fundamental to digital asset production, emphasizing machine-actionability to perform the tasks outlined in their nomenclature. Per these principles, metadata and data at large should be easy to find for both humans and computers, made accessible via implementing standard protocols, use shared vocabularies and formats that allow integration with other data sources, and be reusable—they must be open, free, and universally implementable (Wilkinson et al. 2016). For art objects, standardized metadata classifications include descriptive metadata terms such as title, artist, dimensions, materials, and date of creation, which are all widely used as finding aids in museums and across accessible web archives. For a community archive like the MAPS project, which is multifaceted, independent from institutional oversight, and localized while being global, strictly using standard industry terms for metadata risked the digital twin becoming a disembodied replica. The CARE principles focus on equity, accountability, and community empowerment alongside data transparency and reuse, especially for data involving historically marginalized or colonized groups. As Belarde-Lewis et al. (2024) state, “for data to be truly open, it must also be equitable.” Originally developed for Indigenous data governance, the CARE principles recognize data objects as cultural objects that are collectively owned by a community rather than a single institution, prioritizing people and power. CARE includes collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics as pillars of responsible data stewardship. Collective benefit alludes to data ecosystems that enable communities to generate value from data use. Communities should be prioritized and given the authority to control the collection, access, and use of their data. Those handling the data must act responsibly and ethically, respecting community rights and interests and aligning with the community’s values, cultural protocols, and aspirations when using the data. CARE principles were designed as an accompaniment to FAIR with the intent of shifting the focus from regulation to value-based relationships within digital archiving, “promoting equitable participation in processes of data reuse, which will result in more equitable outcomes” (Carroll et al. 2020). CARE is ultimately a framework for implementing decolonization in digital data use and reuse. As Amanda Figueroa (2025), platform director of the open-access cultural heritage hub Curationist, observes, metadata functions as “a major pillar of online access,” and if inherited without critical review, “the latent biases in metadata records are allowed to proliferate via new technologies.” She cautions that such unexamined data structures risk training future AI systems on biased Western-centric historiographical representations of art and culture, perpetuating inequities in digital knowledge production at its current rapid pace (Foka et al. 2025). Metadata classification terms for the MAPS online archive were adjusted to include both industry standardized items, such as title and artist, and customized ones suitable for the needs of the archive and its community, such as exchange year and the objects’ respective locations of exhibition in Maine and Aomori. The metadata also contain content information about the exchanged artworks, including localized geographical locations within Maine and Aomori depicted in many of the artworks shared, and the artworks’ regional agricultural symbols such as apples, coastal landscapes, and sea life, two thematic elements shared by the sister states and the program’s collection. The CSV structure served both as a curatorial tool and as a basis for the site’s filtering and search functions. With this in mind, the project organizer referenced Christen’s (2012) work on metadata sovereignty to inform classification decisions around culturally sensitive tagging and the proper representation of Japanese and Maine-based contributors and the artistic community created from the MAPS program.
User interface and iterative design elements were decided and developed during an in-person intensive CollectionBuilder course. This step had the steepest learning curve: While basic templates provided by the CollectionBuilder platform were available, customization was required for the online archive to adequately mirror the physical MAPS program, which in turn required basic programming language and instruction for the community organizers, who did not possess advanced programming knowledge. The organizers opted to participate in the course, which provided in-depth instruction from the developers of CollectionBuilder, including troubleshooting and instructional feedback (Fig. 1).
Multilingual integration was deemed a high priority during the planning stages of the online archive. Since the Maine–Aomori sister state represents the cooperation of two communities that do not share the same language, and the MAPS program greatly involved the camaraderie of the regions’ artist communities, developing a bilingual English–Japanese digital twin was crucial. CollectionBuilder’s ability to toggle between languages was highly anticipated by the project organizers.
The landing page of the MAPS Online Archive & Repository (Pelletier 2024) built with CollectionBuilder during an intensive course at the 2024 DHSI, hosted at The University of Victoria, Canada.
Image courtesy of the author.
The MAPS Online Archive & Repository was created and officially launched in June 2024, during an intensive one-week course titled “Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On With CollectionBuilder for Teaching and Exhibits” held at the DHSI at the University of Victoria, Canada. The course was taught by three of CollectionBuilder’s developers: Devin Becker, Olivia Wikle, and Evan Williamson. Participation in the course was funded by a grant provided by the Doctoral Education Consortium at Nagoya University, Japan, as part of the participant’s thesis research and professional development.
The course provided hands-on instruction from CollectionBuilder’s creators on how to use the platform to build a digital collection and exhibit, as well as basic programming skills and knowledge. The course, designed for non-developers and programming beginners in mind, aimed to make the programming elements accessible for scholars and those working in nonprofit and academic institutions, bypassing technical barriers. The course provided access to all necessary software, including instructions on how to install it during the introductory class. This step was followed by ongoing instruction, troubleshooting, and hands-on support on how to use the required software, including GitHub Desktop and Visual Studio Code. This component met the project’s third criteria, allowing local hosting and maintenance of the digital collection.
The course took a structured approach, introducing web development skills such as plain text, CSV data, Markdown, Jekyll static site generator, Git and GitHub, and key digital humanities methodologies including metadata creation, maintenance, and accessibility. Practical learning was especially emphasized: Hands-on learning and individual exploration and development of CollectionBuilder tools were key components of each class. Students could consult the three instructors for troubleshooting as well as developing and integrating ideas for their own digital collection’s exhibition styles and elements. By the end of the course, each participant had successfully built their own digital collection, with the final day dedicated to launching the projects live on the web and obtaining peer feedback.
The MAPS Online Archive & Repository utilizes a CollectionBuilder template that compiles five static web pages for the digital collection: a homepage and an “about” page that features information and contact about the project’s organizer, Friends of Aomori; a “browse” page, with a search function and compiled list of thumbnail images for each item; and a “subjects” page, which generates clickable keywords derived from metadata fields in the master metadata file, allowing users to navigate to images specifically tagged under certain keywords. The platform can accommodate multiple metadata CSV files as well, where additional CSV files can be attributed to specific page functions. The “map” features an interactive world map that can be used to delineate locations relative to the collection’s metadata. This page was customizable through a secondary metadata CSV file, which included classifications specific to the venues and years of exhibition for each item, including longitudinal and latitudinal information to pin locations on an the page’s interactive map that lead to objects related to the pin (Fig. 2).
Example lines from the secondary “maps-venues.csv” file made for the interactive maps page built into the CollectionBuilder template.
This feature fits the project’s desire to accurately depict venues and communities in which the MAPS program exhibited and hosted events during its run. For the MAPS Online Archive & Repository, the map page was configured to pin artworks to the locations of venues in which each was exhibited in multiple locations across Maine and Aomori. This feature was developed in collaboration with the instructors during the course (Fig. 3).
Image of the maps page, which showcases interactive pins of certain artworks and where they were exhibited during the program. Image courtesy of the author.
CollectionBuilder allowed the project to create unique pages beyond what the pre-made templates provided, allowing for the framework to be customized to the project’s vision, branding, and scope. The “gallery” pages featured in the MAPS Online Archive & Repository were created and perfected during the course in an effort to create a digital exhibit style for the collection. The gallery-style pages were made to correspond with each year of the art exchange, from 2015 to 2020, with each page displaying artworks exchanged and exhibited during its respective year. The gallery-style pages also allowed for other categories to be used, including “residency,” a category in the master metadata file that distinguishes specific artworks that were created as part of the artist residencies the MAPS program hosted. This capability met the second criterion of the project, allowing the project to design and brand its digital collection after its art exchange and exhibition activities rather than use generic templates and risk the loss of identity (Fig. 4).
This particular page pulls from the 2018 classifier in the main metadata master CSV file, and compiles images classified as such into an attractive gallery-style grid. Image courtesy of the author.
The fourth criterion was met, but starting with CollectionBuilder without having previous coding experience involved some difficulty. For example, Markdown has a slight learning curve when someone is new to coding languages. Downloading, linking, and uploading metadata CSV and media files to the required software caused confusion in the classroom, with some students being unable to complete these steps during the first session. In addition, as projects started being customized, students would make mistakes in the code and break things in the template. Restarting from scratch was a common occurrence, but it reinforced coding knowledge and the instructors were encouraging. Without the course structure and direct assistance from the instructors, it would have been more difficult to move through these steps. CollectionBuilder does have free, in-depth tutorials on its website, and the templates are fully functional on their own if customization is not required. However, troubleshooting could be difficult for a technical beginner to navigate on their own. The platform may benefit from a message board designated for users to pose questions and issues and receive feedback from the community of CollectionBuilder users.
While the fifth criterion for the project—multi-language display capability—was not yet developed for Japanese language at the time of taking the course, the instructors of CollectionBuilder had already implemented a multi-language translation template for other common languages. Currently supported languages include English, French, German, and Spanish. The template is designed to mirror a digital collection already configured through CollectionBuilder, where the digital collection source code can be copied into the cb-translate project template locally. The cb-translate template features a file titled “_data/translations.yml” that has translations for all labels present on the site. New languages can be added by manually inputting translated terms into this specific file by inserting a new key for the target language as well as the translation for each key present in the YML file. The key is represented by a two letter ISO code; for example, “en” for English, “es” for Spanish, and so on. The translations.yml file can be easily configured to accommodate new languages (Fig. 5).
An example of a translation.yml file for English-Japanese capability developed for the MAPS Online Archive & Digital Repository.
This capability is an exciting feature of CollectionBuilder, as it means any digital collection created through the platform can then be mirrored into another language, and the language capabilities can be expanded and easily reused through GitHub collaboration. Theoretically, any language can be used, which helps bypass the often clunky and at times incorrect translations that built-in AI translation tools in web browsers can produce. Although it requires manual implementation, translation capabilities in CollectionBuilder can be overseen by professional and volunteer translators, and once established, can be freely used as built-in templates for future digital collections produced by the platform. The collaborative nature of the open-source framework allows this possibility. Furthermore, the course in which the MAPS Online Archive & Repository was created exposed other languages for which demand for translated pages exists for projects in other languages, including Arabic. At this time, cb-translate templates for Japanese and Arabic translation are in process. Meeting this criterion makes CollectionBuilder stand out among open-access online digital collection platforms, as it has the capability to accommodate and disseminate transnational and international archives to diverse communities, and it can properly represent any diverse, multilingual archival collections hosted through their platform.
Once completed and launched to the web, the MAPS Online Archive & Repository was evaluated primarily for accessibility and usability, including testing with the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, a browser-based tool that provides feedback on accessibility errors and structural issues on web pages. The launched site was tested using this tool on June 6, 2024, and again on February 28, 2025. Both times, the site was found to be WCAG 2.1 AA-compliant, an internationally recognized metric measuring a web page’s accessibility, specifically its ability to allow those with disabilities to operate, understand, and interact with the page’s digital content. Some minor contrast issues on hover elements and redundant links were found through initial testing, which were adjusted in the custom code after the June test. ALT text is enforced through the CSV metadata file, and the multilingual structure allows users to toggle language via an accessible button. Although the website received scores of 100 in accessibility, best practices, and SEO measures from Google PageSpeed Insights, its performance score was only 65. This sub-optimal score is largely due to image loading times, which can be remedied with better image compression practices.
The site received qualitative feedback during a live interactive presentation on June 7, 2024, during the DHSI from around 300 persons, including class peers as well as other participants and course instructors at the Digital Humanities Institute. The MAPS Online Archive & Repository received high praise for its gallery page design and its metadata customization reflecting the bilingual and cross-cultural elements of the project.
Although formal usability testing was limited, preliminary feedback from MAPS artists, community partners, and bilingual contributors informed interface design adjustments such as Japanese translation elements after the course concluded. Their collective feedback was critical owing to the project’s implementation of CARE principles. Contributing artists were especially pleased with the layout and searchability functions of the site, with the consensus being that the CollectionBuilder site vastly improved upon the previous WordPress site and was a welcome addition to the project as a whole. As one reviewer, a Maine-based Japanese art therapist and member of the Maine–Aomori sister community, stated:
It is such a treasure to be able to see all the work in one place, despite it being online. It exposes me to the depth and energy of this whole MAPS project and really makes me honor and respect the grassroots bridge-building efforts of the people of Maine and Aomori that have been going on for years. This is citizen diplomacy and international friendship in its true form. 感動しました。I am so moved!7
The MAPS Online Archive & Repository, while rooted in grassroots and transnational culture exchange efforts, can be better understood when viewed alongside other digital cultural heritage projects focused on international collaboration and multilingual access in bilateral US–Japan contexts. The Japan Digital Disaster Archive (JDDA; Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, n.d.) provides multilingual access and records of first-person accounts, images, and media related to the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. It uses open-source digital infrastructure to ensure both accessibility and sustainability, with metadata that supports bilingual searching and community-contributed materials. Unlike MAPS’ digital twin model, the JDDA materials are “born-digital” rather than archived from physical sources. The JDDA is also built for curation by global users: It is a participatory archive, with authority being placed in its potential users and uses (Shibayama et al. 2025). It is important, then, to note that JDDA is institutionally backed by Harvard University, with an infrastructure that accommodates a push-pull curation model between associated researchers, experts, curators, and staff with users worldwide. Comparatively, while open-source platforms considered for the MAPS project lack the same capacity, MAPS offers a contrasting example of bottom-up community digital preservation while maintaining similarities with larger, institutionally backed online archives. The Japanese American National Museum (JANM), although a much larger collection than MAPS, originated similarly as a grassroots initiative by Japanese American veterans and community leaders. JANM’s digital collections (JANM, n.d.) are hosted online by a second party, the Densho Digital Repository, an online archive project run by the nonprofit Densho. It serves as an online cultural memory repository, promoting active public participation by receiving, preserving, and mediating the oral histories and materials of Japanese American communities. However, similar to JDDA, JANM’s digital archive is housed within a formal institution and emphasizes social history and identity, whereas the MAPS project is largely based on artistic exchange activities and collection. Still, both projects reflect a commitment to inclusive metadata and culturally sensitive archiving practices, with both adopting the CARE principles for their digital counterparts.
Sister-city digital cultural exchange efforts and the variety present in their iterations are particularly noteworthy, such as the Kobe–Seattle digital archive project and various smaller city-to-city partnerships, many of which lack institutional oversight and rely on local grants and volunteer contributions to launch. One sister city–affiliated digital archive project that directly inspired the MAPS Online Archive & Repository project is the St. Paul–Nagasaki Photo Exchange Project (Brandt 2023), a Wix-hosted website with gallery style pages showcasing photographs captured by photography students at select schools in Nagasaki city and St. Paul during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. While it is hosted on Wix, the site features an external link to a ThingLink landing page, a platform that allows users to create interactive images, videos, and 360°/VR media by adding clickable classification tags as hotspots. This project used the ThingLink web platform to compile the students’ photographs onto interactive maps of their respective locations, giving viewers a chance to view the students’ photography in correspondence to the actual locations where they were taken in the city. The program also enlisted the help of Japanese language students in providing Japanese translations for the photograph’s captions to make their interactive map linguistically accessible for the Nagasaki students.8 The interactive map element was particularly intriguing for the MAPS project organizers, especially its targeted language translation and incorporation of a wider net of community contributors and stakeholders. This intercultural sensibility is a highlight of sister-city programs and highlights their communal uniqueness. Sister-city digital archives have the potential to emphasize the informal citizen diplomacy with which they operate and contribute to sustained civic involvement and engagement, and it is crucial to explore the various options in keeping them interculturally accessible and online for the long term.
The digital collections produced by students in the course varied in content and scope, as the projects reflected the diverse backgrounds and institutions of the participants. The class had approximately 30 students, with many saying that their search for an accessible and open-source platform for their digital collection projects led them to the DHSI course. Many students were academic scholars and faculty with humanities backgrounds, some with professional experience and most with interest in the digital humanities. Some shared that their respective institutions had recently stopped using paid digital collection platforms to save on costs, leading them to seek free options as possible replacements. The resulting digital collections ranged from archives housed in academic museums to objects obtained during academic fieldwork to private collections of personal family photographs. The course results demonstrated how CollectionBuilder is suitable for large and small collections for both institutional, community-driven, and even individual archival needs.9
In December 2024, after the completion of the course, the MAPS Online Archive & Repository and its use of CollectionBuilder were presented via a poster presentation at the Joint Symposium of Linked Pasts 10 and Linked Pasts Japan 1 at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan.10 The presentation focused on the development of online digital collections aimed at community access, with a special emphasis on multilingual participants and audiences. CollectionBuilder was presented as an option for such archives looking to go online, with the MAPS Online Archive & Repository as an example, highlighting elements corresponding to the aforementioned criteria. Fellow presenters and audience members described their own searches for online archival options for projects they or their institutions were involved in, with some looking for bilingual Japanese and English options. The digital humanities community remains small in Japan relative to other regions such as Canada and the United States, but it is growing. It is important to conduct knowledge-sharing of digital humanities platforms like CollectionBuilder, and presenting the MAPS Online Archive & Repository served as a case study for its use in a US–Japan project. The Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH) recognizes that “despite the significance and importance [of Digital Humanities], such research activities in Japan have not been connected to international academic societies, and therefore, with a few exceptions, their existence is not well known internationally, which is a somewhat unfortunate situation.”11 However, the inaugural Linked Pasts Japan Symposium made a step forward in fostering international collaboration and expanding the presence of digital humanities in Japan. Additionally, Nagoya University recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the university’s Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences’ opening in April 2025. Future plans to present the MAPS Online Archive & Repository and CollectionBuilder through the Center are in development.
As for MAPS and its digital collection, the MAPS Online Archive & Repository remains accessible online, with more items being added as they are photographed by their respective caretakers within the program’s circle of contributors. The Japanese language translations for the cb-translate component remain in progress. The metadata-driven foundational framework of CollectionBuilder makes adding to the collection simple, and the template can be copied for other visual culture projects Friends of Aomori decides to pursue in the future. The MAPS program’s organizers hope to share the MAPS program through its Online Archive & Repository in CollectionBuilder to other sister city and sister state organizations—of US–Japan partnership and beyond—that may be considering digital collections for their arts initiatives or implementing their own art exchanges. The archive’s sustainability is crucial for this: Ensuring the long-term viability of the MAPS Online Archive & Repository is an ongoing concern. As a community-based project with minimal institutional backing, MAPS relies on distributed stewardship and proactive documentation, both of which rely on volunteer contribution. This model poses a continuous risk for sustainability, as the “passing of the baton” within grassroots community projects can impose obstacles on projects previously helmed by departing contributors. The use of GitHub Pages for site hosting ensures a free and stable environment with built-in version tracking, and all files used for the site, including metadata CSV files, translations, and layout customizations, are stored in a public GitHub repository with clear directory structures and README documentation. Consequently, files can be shared and knowledge kept in-house, making it easier for community members to train each other and minimizing risk. However, despite the provided instructions and documentation, knowledge transfer between rotating contributors is still necessary and essential for the archive’s longevity. Detailed guides are in progress, covering metadata entry, image uploading, and basic web maintenance instructions. Non-technical users need to be kept in mind in the production of such materials to enable their reuse by future volunteers or collaborators regardless of skill and ability.
Ongoing development of the physical MAPS project and its digital twin underlines the importance of knowledge-sharing and preservation between sisters and aims to disseminate information and open-access archiving techniques for grassroots cultural heritage projects to get online. As digital humanities and archival technologies continue to become more accessible, projects like the MAPS Online Archive & Repository demonstrate the potential of open-source platforms in promoting cross-cultural exchange, accessibility, and autonomized preservation in the hands of the community stewards. For arts initiatives led by sister cities and sister states, multilingual and customizable options for their unique language requirements and choice of media representation within their communities are essential. The MAPS Online Archive & Repository serves as a model for what a volunteer-led program with unique, community-linked archival needs can create using an open-source, static website builder from an increasing number of open-source options.
It is essential, however, to recognize that such digitization efforts are dependent on and mirror a physical collection; the existence of a digital twin necessarily relies on the existence of a physical twin source. The digital twin of a community archive does not stand on its own: It is shaped by and contingent upon the physical collection it mirrors. Physical cultural heritage collections, which are grassroots-born and -run, often exist perpetually in precarity, owing to the fragility arising from being communally informed and volunteer-led and housing objects created and cared for by community members. Such collections naturally fragment over time, owing to the rotating door of members, generational gaps, or even sudden loss, as was experienced by the Maine–Aomori sister state community. These grassroots collections also risk decay because of the absence of institutionalized support and standard preservation capabilities, such as adequate storage space or climate control measures necessary for artwork preservation. The objects themselves have inherent cultural value: They serve as representations of community memory and identity, community collaboration, and tangible embodiments of lived experience, creativity, shared knowledge, and history. A lack of institutional infrastructure for support can be an intentional choice, as maintaining a community’s autonomy in their collection’s governance is crucial for its longevity and therefore irreplaceable. In the case of the MAPS program, for which the Aomori-based collection had institutional support and proper long-term storage, the Maine sister organization discussed approaching local museums and art institutions to request their taking stewardship over MAPS’ accumulated collection, which had been shifted between project organizers’ homes for years. This idea was eventually shelved owing to doubts about the ability to share the collection widely with the Maine public and other sister-city affiliations looking to implement similar projects. The physical MAPS collection has since developed a loan program agreement with Maine-based businesses and public buildings, where they can be displayed in public spaces within the community for both preservation and accessibility purposes. Self-maintenance presents an ongoing risk, but choosing the correct online platform with a “manage it for life” approach can mitigate said risk and help keep the community project alive. Each project’s needs are different, but for MAPS, CollectionBuilder was the correct choice.
Grassroots cultural heritage is a manifestation of affective connection, carrying emotional and historical weight for those who recognize its significance. For MAPS, the need existed for a permanent site for the collection to be housed in a way that allowed community access while maintaining the community’s authority, for people to see the art and as a means for them to learn about the project and those involved. This role is now fulfilled by the MAPS Online Archive & Repository, functioning in tandem with the physical collection as its digital twin. MAPS was and continues to be a people-to-people project. Digital twins of such collections should not be seen as replacements, but as extensions of community-driven and maintained cultural heritage collections that can broaden their reach and engagement, both for those directly connected to the collection and for others seeking to learn from its history and the community-based methods of preserving and presenting cultural heritage that shape it.
The data analysis file and all annotator data files are available in the The Maine-Aomori Printmaking Society( link here ) repository.
In this case, a “digital heritage twin” serves as a dynamic, accessible counterpart to a heritage asset, such as a place-based archive or collection. It is essentially the digital counterpart that incorporates all digital data related to its associated project in an accessible digital format, with the aim of long-term preservation for cultural heritage study. In 2023, a UNESCO Chair in Digital Twins for World Heritage Conservation was established by Universidad del Azuay and Carleton University (n.d.) with the aim of advance research on digital twins to support the conservation of UNESCO-listed cultural heritage sites.
The four artists who participated in the 2016 artist residency were Reiko Kudoh, Yoshiko Takebayashi, Yoshimasa Tsuji, and Seizo Yagihashi, led by the Munakata Shikō Memorial Museum of Art Director, Jiro Ono (SPACE Gallery 2016).
Information about the program and its sponsors were reported via their partnership with the Maine Maritime Museum (n.d.).
Data taken from 2023 Maine Census Data (Migration Policy Institute, n.d.)
Scott Nash discusses the book and his devastation over the loss of his friend Toshiki Sawada in an article in the Portland Press Herald (Gallagher 2012).
The museum announced its closure on its official website, shuttering its doors on March 31, 2024 (Munakata Shikō Memorial Museum of Art, n.d.).
Direct quote from Yuko Handa, personal communication, March 2025.
The St. Paul–Nagasaki Photo Exchange website remains online (Brandt 2023).
A sample of digital collections built during the 2024 CollectionBuilder course at DHSI2024 is available online (CollectionBuilder, n.d.).
A list of presentations, including the MAPS poster presentation, can be found online (Linked Pasts 10, n.d.)
Translated from the original Japanese in “A message to Japanese scholars who are applying digital technologies to the humanities” on the membership page of JADH’s website (JADH, n.d.):
「日本にはデジタル技術を人文学に応用することを目指す様々な重要な研究活動が展開されています。一方で、国際的には、そのような動向はDigital Humanities(DH)と名付けられ、一つの大きな潮流を形成しつつあります。しかしながら、これまで、日本におけるそうした研究活動は、その意義や重要性にも関わらず、国際学会に繋 がっていないために、一部を除いてその存在が国際的には十分に知られておらず、いささか残念な状況にあります。」
