From cultural assets to recorded knowledge: Rethinking digital heritage platforms as documentary infrastructures

Abstract

National digital heritage platforms are often treated as access portals that disseminate digitized cultural materials. This article argues that they can also operate as documentary infrastructures through which cultural assets are transformed into recorded, searchable and publicly intelligible knowledge. Drawing on document theory, knowledge organization and infrastructure studies, the article develops a Documentary Transformation Model of Cultural Assets and examines it through a conceptually driven, theory-informed qualitative case study of Taiwan’s National Cultural Heritage Website. The abductive analysis combines policy and institutional documents, structured platform analysis and semi-structured interviews with nine administrators and system-related personnel. Four interrelated mechanisms are identified: institutional recognition, documentary recording, knowledge organization and publicization. The study also identifies infrastructural incompleteness as a persistent condition in which institutional mandates, documentary practices, metadata standards, technical systems, resources, and public interfaces remain only partially aligned. The evidence shows how legal status and administrative categories make assets documentable; cumulative records stabilize institutional memory; metadata and interfaces produce searchability; and public-facing records create conditions for visibility and scrutiny without demonstrating actual audience reception. The article contributes an integrative, process-oriented framework for studying how cultural assets become documentary objects within public knowledge systems. It does not claim that all heritage platforms operate identically; rather, it specifies analytical questions and evidence that can support cross-institutional, cross-platform and cross-cultural comparison.