The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the local community can participate in the development of a participatory archive and how the community, archives and other heritage institutions can collaborate. The aim of the research is to provide insight into and access to the cultural heritage of a given community, digitize heritage objects and establish an online archive and explore the possibilities of its construction in terms of finding the most appropriate way to collect the material. For the case study, the Municipality of Starigrad was selected and the archived online Topotheque system was produced within the ICARUS (International Center for Archival Research) community. The example of the case study explored possible ways of collecting materials with the participation of institutions and associations related to the Starigrad area, Topoteka Starigrad was established and guidelines for describing the contents of the Topoteka platform were developed. Guidelines are designed to help interested communities in launching their own virtual archives. The scientific method used in the research is the qualitative method - case study. The result of the work was the participatory archive of Topoteka Starigrad with the initial corpus of over 220 digitized and published photos, successful communication with the top administrators of the international Topotheque system regarding the upgrade of the system in accordance with the detected deficiency and development of metadata guidelines for describing the archival material units so after the initial establishment of the system, selected representatives of the local community could further supplement and maintain Topoteka Starigrad.