84 th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology | Oct. 29 – Nov. 3, 2021 | Salt Lake City, UT. Author(s) retain copyright, but ASIS&T receives an exclusive publication license. ASIS&T Annual Meeting 2021 811 Posters Understanding the Role of Community Collaboration Within Indigenous Cultural Heritage Data Migrations Alexandria Rayburn University of Michigan School of Information, United States arayburn@umich.edu ABSTRACT Many museums and archives globally hold heritage items belonging to Indigenous peoples of North America. There are current efforts to begin decolonizing the practices and legacies of these collections, and one way this is done is through digital access to Indigenous cultural heritage. This poster examines The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) Knowledge Sharing System, a digital platform that aggregates museum and archival records into a centralized database at a point of data migration. Data migrations are not only necessary as a point for technical updates, but also for theoretical changes in the system itself as the needs of its users change. This is the case for the knowledge sharing system as it moves from a password protected system to one that is open to the public. Rooted in qualitative research from semi-structured interviews with the creators, maintainers, and users of the database, this poster illustrates how GRASAC is working to meet the needs of their user community, and what unique challenges are faced when prioritizing Indigenous knowledge within a database created for western information organization. KEYWORDS Indigenous data practices; Data migration; Community collaboration; Platform design. INTRODUCTION This poster identifies and unpacks points of negotiation within The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts & Cultures (GRASAC) Knowledge Sharing database. GRASAC is a research alliance that hosts a database that aggregates records from museum collections belonging to Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region (Bohaker et al., 2015) and is currently undergoing a migration from password protection to a system that is open to the public. This change within the database brings to the surface some of the needs that the unique cultural data held within the system has, along with additional desires from users, many of whom are Indigenous. This research seeks to understand how negotiations are resolved and embodied within the sites of contestation in the infrastructure development of the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing System. BACKGROUND Many museums and memory institutions hold ethnographic collections, or material about or belonging to Indigenous people. Museums are institutions with colonial legacies, and for much of their history the goals of their collections were not to preserve knowledge for Indigenous communities, but for settlers' own agendas pertaining to Indigenous peoples including research, government organization, and land control. Some institutions that manage these collections are now realizing the need to share their collections and its knowledge with the original communities, and are making efforts to do this, often through online portals, digital archives, or other digital platforms. These are sometimes aggregated data sets that include multiple museum collections, or a single institution's own online platform. This is not a straightforward process though, as the needs of the Indigenous communities must be centered as a priority, and often western systems of archiving, organization, standardization, and cataloging are not equipped to handle this. The theoretical framing of this research draws from interpretivist work in overlapping information fields including information organization, museum studies, and feminist and Indigenous data practices (Leavy and Harris 2019; Wemigwans 2018; Wilson 2008). Rooted in qualitative research from semi-structured interviews with the creators, maintainers, contributors, and users of the database, this research presents GRASAC as a case study to understand the motivations behind changes to their database. The knowledge sharing system currently holds two types of records: language items and heritage items. Language items are words and phrases from Indigenous languages (Anishinaabe and Cayuga are the languages with the most entries currently) that can be attached to a heritage item to describe it (Willmott et al. 2016), or used independently for language revitalization purposes. This poster is focusing on changes to heritage items specifically, which are generally objects in museum collections and archival material.