The topic of environmental digital sustainability has evolved from a marginal technical consideration into a structural, cultural, and ethical imperative for cultural heritage organisations and digital humanities (DH) practitioners. Rising global awareness of the climate crisis, escalating compute energy demands, and the accelerating adoption of generative AI have created an urgent need for sustainability literacy that spans institutions and professional communities. This paper discusses cross-stakeholder engagement initiatives, that strengthen community connections while promoting responsible uses of digital platforms and emerging technologies. It showcases activities which expand engagement beyond technical audiences to diverse stakeholder groups, including library and heritage practitioners and professionals, and academic researchers.

Digital Sustainability best practices, while growing in visibility, remain emergent and unevenly adopted. Existing guidance often clusters into areas such as Green IT and infrastructure (see e.g. Murugesan 2008), or dark data and digital waste (see e.g. Jackson / Hodgkinson 2023). However, Several communities have begun synthesising knowledge into shared resources and toolkits. The Digital Humanities Climate Coalition Toolkit (DHCC 2026) remains the most relevant, DH-specific reference point, offering guidance on greener research lifecycles, AI and the cloud (Walton et al. 2024), and creating sustainable data management plans (DHCC Information, Measurement and Practice Action Group 2022). This paper spotlights three inter-connected engagement domains that showcase community resource creation, tailored training design, and higher education research.

The first domain focuses on engagement with the library professional sector. Two working groups of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries, teamed up to co-develop a centralised digital skills hub for heritage and research library professionals on topics of Digital Scholarship and Data Science. The recently published Digital Sustainability topic guide (Keinan-Schoonbaert 2025b) provides an overview of the topic and includes case studies from museums and archives on greener digitisation, digital preservation, green web design, and responsible AI practice; tutorials including digital declutter toolkits and carbon calculators; and a section on communities of practice, providing several engagement options. This new resource uniquely centralises digital sustainability information and training for a library professional audience.

The second domain applies to engagement within a heritage organisation, specifically members of staff. It takes the British Library as an example showcasing how a staff-led sustainability group can complement organisational strategies and policies. This action-based staff network encourages the creation of internal working groups, such as one which created a ‘green poster’, sharing sustainability tips and best practices with members of staff. The network illustrates how agency and ownership can be distributed to non-technical GLAM staff. Additionally, the Library’s existing induction and learning programmes were expanded to embed sustainability literacy, with many training opportunities dedicated to digital sustainability. After a successful DHCC workshop, which concentrated on its toolkit, a demand for specific training around digital sustainability practices led to the design and delivery of a training series entitled Discover Digital Sustainability (Keinan-Schoonbaert 2025a). This series included professional talks on topics such as museum digitisation, digital preservation, web design, and records management, a reading group session on the topic of data and digital waste, and three workshops including a carbon-impact card game, a green web design workshop, and a collaborative workshop which started shaping the LIBER Digital Sustainability topic guide mentioned above. This series created an institutional knowledge base which is multi-modal, participatory, and community centred.

The third domain covered in this talk is about engaging researchers, within the DH sphere and beyond. Firstly, the paper considers a DHCC working group which updated the publication “Interpreting UKRI Environmental Sustainability Guidance for Digital Humanities” and created a researcher self-assessment tool to accompany it (Baker et al. 2026, Little et al. 2026). These offer guidance and advice on how to implement sustainable DH research practices suggested by the most recent UK Research and Innovation environmental sustainability strategy (UKRI 2025). The paper also outlines a new PhD placement developed at the British Library on the theme of “Researching Digital Duplication and Sustainability”. Planned to begin in June 2026, the project will investigate the extent to which digitised collections are being duplicated across institutions and published online. Such duplication contributes to carbon emissions and water consumption associated with powering and maintaining the servers that host these digital assets.

The Digital Sustainability engagement work presented in this paper demonstrates a diversity of stakeholder engagement spheres as well as different types of activities and resources, which will hopefully inspire and encourage climate action. It is crucial that DH communities who are increasingly dependent on AI and other technologies are aware of the ecological impact of their digital practices, ensuring that technological innovation and research progress responsibly alongside environmental stewardship.