Report on the DARIAH-CH Study Day 2025: Archiving in Motion

On 18 September 2025, the annual DARIAH-CH Study Day took place at the University of Lausanne and EPFL under the theme “Archiving in Motion: Navigating the Future of Cultural Heritage.” Over the years, this event has become a key platform for Switzerland’s arts and digital humanities community, bringing together researchers, archivists, cultural heritage professionals, and institutions to discuss how repositories, archives and other infrastructure components are being reshaped by digital technologies and innovative methodologies.

Purpose and Audience

The 2025 edition aimed to provide a space for reflection and exchange on the evolving role of archives in the humanities, media studies, and heritage research, with a particular focus on the influence of digital infrastructures and tools. The Study Day gathered PhD students, researchers, archivists, curators, data stewards, and professionals from museums and heritage institutions interested and involved in digital preservation and cultural data.

Programme Highlights

The day opened with the first keynote lecture:“Environmental impact of data infrastructures, digitization, and archiving” by Anne Baillot (DARIAH EU). Anne Baillot addressed the invisible environmental impact of digital technologies. Currently, there is no real awareness, even among academics, for the systemic environmental issues connected to the wide use of digital technologies. In her keynote, discussed these issues and proposed a way forward with strategies based on infrastructure sharing, sensible digitization, and low-resource archiving, pleading for digital sufficiency as our best chance. She also introduced the DARIAH goes Green internal environmental guidelines, and strives, through her work, to raise awareness about the environmental impact of digital technologies

Two dynamic pitch and discussion sessions followed, offering a snapshot of the diversity of digital archiving initiatives and actions in Switzerland and beyond. Contributions came from researchers and professionals from museums, archives and heritage institutions.

• Session 1 explored topics such as OCR-based semantic structuring, Nodegoat applications, FAIR data management in archival contexts, AI for historical data extraction, participatory audiovisual archiving, and the preservation of microcomputer environments.

• Session 2 delved into decolonising knowledge in GLAM institutions, immersive digital storytelling, playful and gamified heritage practices, territorial memory projects, sustainable web strategies, and innovative data-linking techniques.

In the afternoon, Felix Rauh (Memoriav) gave the second keynote, “Responsible navigation through the Swiss audiovisual landscape”, in which he gave an overview of the work done by Memoriav, the Swiss Audiovisual Heritage Centre, since 2022 to catalogue Swiss audiovisual heritage. The catalogue provides a detailed overview of audiovisual collections of public interest, which are not only found in memory institutions but are also widely distributed among companies, associations and private individuals. Felix Rauh also highlighted the challenges of managing complex audiovisual collections across institutions, and that need to launch a dynamic political/strategic and cultural movement towards so that this so that audiovisual collections become increasingly institutionalised and accessible.

The day concluded with a guided visit of the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) at EPFL showcased how immersive visualization, aesthetic design, and data science intersect to create new modes of cultural interpretation.

The abstracts of all contributions are available here.

Organisers and Acknowledgements

The event was organised by an inter-institutional team: Sarah Kenderdine (EPFL), Tsz Kin Chau (EPFL), Anita Auer (UNIL), Anne-Katrin Weber (UNIL), Tobias Hodel (University of Bern), Cristina Grisot (DARIAH-CH) and Rita Gautschy (DaSCH, DARIAH-CH).

DARIAH-CH extends its warmest thanks to all speakers, participants, and partner institutions for their contributions to this vibrant and thought-provoking event.

Key Takeaways and Future Perspectives

The Study Day highlighted several strategic priorities and challenges shaping the future of digital archiving in Switzerland and Europe:

• The need for interoperability of metadata, sustainable distributed infrastructures, and hybrid tools that combine technical efficiency with cultural responsibility.

• Awareness of the environmental footprint of data infrastructures and the urgency of adopting greener digitization and preservation practices.

• The growing role of AI and semantic technologies in enriching, structuring, and reinterpreting archival materials—balanced by strong ethical frameworks and attention to authenticity and provenance.

• The importance of developing shared theoretical frameworks between traditional archival science and digital humanities to foster integrated, interdisciplinary approaches.

• The necessity of national and transnational collaboration for governance, tool sharing, training, and equitable access to digital heritage infrastructures.

  
  

Building on the insights of this event, DARIAH-CH reaffirms its commitment to:

• Strengthening interdisciplinary collaborations;

• Supporting training for data archiving in a FAIR-compliant manner;

• Fostering communities of practice that connect researchers, archivists and other professionals, as well as infrastructure providers, such as the DARIAH-CH GLAM Working Group

• Organizing future editions of the Study Day as spaces for exchange, co-creation, and experimentation.