The growing emphasis on opening cultural heritage through digitisation has significantly increased the formal availability of performing arts archives. At the same time, this development raises a central question: how is access translated into communication? This paper examines the communication challenges that emerge when theatre archives become digitally accessible but remain limited in terms of visibility, usability, and integration into scholarly communication and public use.

The paper departs from the assumption that access is not a binary condition but a structured and mediated process. The availability of digitised materials does not automatically ensure their participation in knowledge production. In many cases, digital archives remain underdeveloped in terms of communication due to limited discoverability, inconsistent metadata practices, and restricted conditions of reuse. As a result, they may create an appearance of openness while maintaining constrained regimes of visibility and access in practice.

The analysis approaches theatre archives as communication environments rather than neutral repositories. Instead of focusing on digitisation as a technical process, the paper examines how archival systems organise information, enable or limit user interaction, and shape the interpretation of cultural heritage. Particular attention is given to the role of searchability, metadata structuring, and full-text accessibility in transforming archival materials into communicatively usable resources.

The study is based on a qualitative, communication-oriented analysis of theatre archival practices, informed by the Croatian context. Rather than presenting a single institutional model, the paper uses this context to identify broader structural patterns that characterise access to performing arts heritage. These include fragmentation of collections across institutions, lack of integration between archival systems, and the absence of coherent communication frameworks that would support effective use of digitised materials.

From a communication science perspective, access must be understood as a function of system design, information organisation, and user-oriented mediation. In this sense, digital archives operate as knowledge infrastructures that shape the circulation, interpretation, and reuse of cultural content. Their communicative capacity depends not only on technological solutions but on the alignment between institutional practices, metadata standards, and user needs.

This argument is situated within recent discussions on Open Science, which emphasise accessibility, transparency, and reuse as core principles of scholarly communication. However, as highlighted in contemporary policy frameworks (UNESCO, 2021; European Commission, 2023), the implementation of these principles depends on the development of infrastructures that support meaningful access rather than mere availability. The paper extends this perspective by demonstrating that, in the context of theatre heritage, communication remains a critical but often underdeveloped dimension of openness.

By reframing access as a communication problem, the paper contributes to the understanding of digital cultural heritage within scholarly communication. It argues that opening theatre archives requires not only digitisation, but the development of communication structures that enable discoverability, interpretation, and reuse across academic and public communities.