The Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the Dutch museum for architecture, design, and digital cultures holding the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, is implementing different initiatives to bring overlooked actors and forgotten stories into the discussion. The aim is to examine the role that archives play in the construction of the history of cities and their inhabitants, as well as to contest institutional memory and the dominant historiography. Since 2020, the project Collecting Otherwise seeks to disclose, create proximity to, and enlarge the understanding of the relevance and intersections of the National Collection of Architecture and Urban Planning regarding contemporary societal urgencies. In this collaborative process, the Nieuwe Instituut collaborates with a wide array of external researchers, among whom the co-authors of this paper throughout the project Cherchez la femme! (2021-2023) This contribution maps these interlinked activities to further investigate how these experiences, situated around unacknowledged agents, have transformed the institutional procedures of archiving, collecting, and curating. During this process of preserving, creating, and transferring knowledge, certain collection choices have been made, and new heritage practices have been developed. This paper elaborates on the consequences of these choices from the different positions required in the archival process: curator, researcher, activist, and donor. Rather than understanding heritage as a neutral and objective legacy, this approach goes beyond the archival process itself, presenting new forms of collecting, producing, and transferring knowledge during, meanwhile and after the process of archival collection starts.