Barriers to research engagement in South Africa, including awareness of available resources, institutional support, and socio-economic factors, shape how scholars in the Global South produce and share knowledge. Platforms such as the SADiLaR repository and the Ibali digital collections at the University of Cape Town (UCT) have been developed to facilitate the sharing and reuse of indigenous language resources. Yet a critical question remains: to what extent do FAIR-compliant platforms translate into meaningful preservation and reuse of indigenous language resources in Southern Africa?
This paper addresses that question through a comparative case study of two initiatives that approach resource sharing from different vantage points: the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) repository and the Ibali showcase platform at UCT. Both serve the broader digital humanities research community but cater to distinctly different audiences and modes of engagement. Central to our discussion are the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) which provide a framework for making indigenous language resources not only available but actively usable. FAIR applies to data, metadata, and the infrastructure supporting them, with a particular emphasis on machine-actionability, enabling computational systems to locate and reuse materials at scale. Embedding FAIR into open science practices creates conditions where indigenous languages are not only preserved but remain active within global knowledge networks.
Our comparative analysis reveals how different design philosophies produce different forms of engagement. Ibali offers a visually rich, curated experience, such as browsing an early isiXhosa newspaper archive in a layout faithful to the original. SADiLaR’s repository, by contrast, makes structured datasets available for download and reuse, mainly enabling research related to natural language research. As Adam and Kaur (2021:167) state “Effective implementation and management of institutional repositories can streamline the contribution of African researchers and facilitate discovery and access to their findings globally”. This statement holds across both field-specific repositories and showcase platforms. Designing for FAIR means accommodating diverse modes of engagement without compromising accessibility or reuse, a challenge that requires teams with interdisciplinary skill sets.
Making resources FAIR is not only about access; it is about enabling reuse in meaningful ways. This distinction becomes urgent in the age of AI-driven research. Autonomous systems increasingly crawl digital heritage sites, feeding indigenous language data into dominant language models. This raises ethical questions that FAIR alone cannot resolve: does this process benefit the communities whose languages are represented? Licensing frameworks become central here. Instruments such as the Nwulite Obodo Open Data License offer models for acknowledging origin and, where necessary, restricting certain uses. Reuse must reinforce cultural memory and respect for the communities behind the data, not merely serve computational convenience.
We argue that even FAIR practices do more than support present research, they safeguard the capacity to conduct future research, preserving the memory of the world. The platforms we examine act as bridges between digital infrastructure and living language communities, demonstrating that sustainable, equitable digital humanities practice in Africa depends on building systems that serve both researchers and the communities whose knowledge they hold.