Digital heritage ecologies in Oman: institutional archives, grassroots media, and community archive-making in musical intangible cultural heritage

This article examines how Omani musical intangible cultural heritage is safeguarded through the interaction of institutional archives, grassroots archivists, musicians, audiences, and digital platforms. It argues that Omani traditional music is best understood not as material preserved in a single repository, but as part of a plural digital heritage ecology in which preservation, circulation, interpretation, and transmission are distributed across formal and informal archival spaces. The study uses a multi-phase qualitative design. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oman between 2021 and 2024, including interviews, archival observation, policy-document analysis, and observation of musical events and community-based heritage practices. It also incorporates a 2025 review of 103 publicly available digital sources across Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok. Interview excerpts, field observations, and examples from the digital review are presented so that readers can see how the findings were derived from the data. The findings show that institutional archives provide continuity, cataloguing systems, technical expertise, and legal authority, but may face limitations related to access, copyright, decontextualization, and the difficulty of preserving music as living practice. Grassroots and platform-based archives capture performance closer to community contexts and support visibility and intergenerational transmission, yet remain vulnerable to weak metadata, deletion, misattribution, account inactivity, and platform change. The article argues that sustainable safeguarding requires stronger collaboration between institutional preservation systems and community-based digital practices. By proposing a plural digital heritage ecology, and by situating it within current research on digital heritage practice, cultural memory, and platforms, it contributes to archival science, digital heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and intangible cultural heritage research.