From Digital Access to Digital Stewardship: A Music and Performing-Arts Agenda

The vocabulary of digital work in music and the performing arts is filled with the language of opening: open scores, recordings, programmes, archives, and access. These ambitions have enabled research, teaching, listening, viewing, and participation. Yet the availability of a recording, image, score, or transcript does not make a collection intelligible, equitable, or sustainable. Search interfaces privilege some descriptions; metadata can preserve colonial classifications; rights uncertainty can discourage reuse; and short-term funding can leave performance collections technically available but practically abandoned. Digital humanities scholarship has shown that technical systems are never neutral containers for culture. Music and performing-arts institutions must turn that insight into sustained curatorial practice.

The shift should be from digital access to digital stewardship. Access describes a condition at one moment; stewardship describes a relationship over time. It includes preservation, documentation, governance, repair, and willingness to revise decisions when artists, audiences, or communities identify harm or omission. Stewardship recognizes that performance records are not merely content to be extracted. Recordings, scores, costumes, rehearsal documents, and oral histories may connect to living identities, lineages, sacred practices, contested ownership, or memories of displacement. Making materials visible without considering terms of visibility can intensify rather than reduce inequity.

Community archives and artist-led collections demonstrate that people want more than inclusion in repositories; they seek authority over how music, performances, and histories are described and circulated. Shared authority should not be reduced to consultation after technical decisions are made. It should begin when a project defines its purpose. Performers, creators, and communities connected to the material should be able to influence selection, description, access conditions, contextual notes, and procedures for correction or removal.

This approach need not imply that every music or performance collection must be governed identically. It requires institutions to identify who may be affected by digitization and document how decisions were reached. A governance record should accompany the record of an object or performance. Future users ought to know who supplied the description, which terms were contested, what restrictions apply, and when the record was reviewed. Provenance is therefore artistic, intellectual, and social as well as material.

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance complement FAIR by emphasizing collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics. Although CARE emerged in relation to Indigenous data, its lesson matters to music and performing-arts stewardship, especially where songs, dances, performances, oral histories, or community knowledge remain connected to communities. Circulation must be balanced by responsibility toward those represented.

Digital music and performance projects are funded for innovation but not upkeep. A platform attracts support; migration, accessibility testing, link repair, rights clarification, and metadata revision do not. This pattern creates a cycle in which institutions launch impressive resources that become difficult to use, hear, view, cite, or verify. Maintenance should be recognized as curatorial work. Revising a subject heading, documenting a disputed attribution, improving a transcript, restoring captioning, or creating an accessible alternative to an interface can change the questions researchers, performers, students, and publics are able to ask.

Institutions should publish maintenance plans that identify responsibility, review intervals, preservation formats, and procedures for reporting errors. They should preserve version histories. Silent correction may improve a record, but it removes evidence of how knowledge changed. Versioned description allows an archive to acknowledge earlier terminology or attribution without continuing to present it as authoritative.

Music and performing-arts projects can make stewardship operational through five commitments:

• establish community participation before digitization priorities are fixed;
• publish plain-language statements explaining description, access, and removal policies;
• budget for preservation, accessibility, migration, and metadata revision beyond launch;
• provide routes through which users can challenge descriptions or contribute knowledge; and
• evaluate use, asking whose research, teaching, listening, performance, memory work, or artistic participation the collection makes possible.

Music and performing-arts institutions should resist the idea that digitization democratizes culture. Digital availability can broaden participation, but institutions, artists, and communities create conditions under which participation is informed and just. Stewardship places accountability, continuity, and context at the center of music and performance work. The question is not whether cultural materials can be placed online. It is whether performances, recordings, scores, and traces can remain interpretable, contestable, accessible, and responsibly connected to people whose histories they carry.