The Information Work of Community Archives: A Systematic Literature Review (original) (raw)
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Archives and Manuscripts, 2017
Community archives have compelled shifts in dominant archival management practices to reflect community agency and values. To analyse these shifts, we ask: In what ways do community archives and their staff challenge traditional archival modes of practice? Do community archives work within or against dominant frameworks for institutional sustainability? Do community archives challenge or replicate dominant custody practices? Based on semi-structured interviews with 17 founders, staff and volunteers at 12 Southern California community archives, this research examines the diverse models of practice utilised by community archives practitioners that diverge from and challenge standard practices in the field. By addressing these questions, our research uncovers a variety of models of practice employed by communities in Southern California to autonomously create and sustain their archives.
Independent Community Archives: Challenging the Status Quo of Private and Public Archives
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The community archives movement has emerged as a prominent, and often critical, presence within, and also outside the archival traditions and practices in North America and the United Kingdom. They can take many forms and often contest how both public and private archives in these regions have historically been understood, structured and operated. This paper first presents a brief review of some of the ways in which community archives have been framed in the archival literature. It then considers several questions regarding how such framings of community archives might challenge the status quo of private and public archives as currently defined and organized under the recently revised Croatian legislative framework and proposes a more conciliatory approach.
KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION, 2019
Remix or bricolage is recognized as a primary mode of knowledge creation in contemporary digital culture. Archival arrangement represents a form of bricolage that archivists have been practicing for years. By organizing records according to provenance, archivists engage in knowledge creation. Archival theory holds that records are created as an output from social and bureaucratic processes. Archival description, then, could serve as a form of archival record, bearing evidence of the processes of archival arrangement. Current participatory and community-based approaches to archival description urgently require an evidential record of their processes of community consultation and professional mediation. This paper examines two Canadian community-based, participatory archival projects. Project Naming, at Library and Archives Canada, draws upon Inuit community contributions to augment the often sparse and sometimes offensive descriptions of historic photos of arctic peoples. The Sex Wor...
Archival Issues, 2021
Institutional archives with community documentation missions face problems of limited resources and community resistance in developing collections. Inspired by field experience and archival literature, the authors propose one possible solution that can be a stand-alone project or an adjunct to traditional collection development. Their distributed archives model envisions one-on-one partnerships between institutional archives and community partners to share authority over appraisal and selection while leaving custody of community collections with their creators. Institutional partners provide leadership, mentoring, and support, while community partners appraise, select, process, arrange, and describe. This article describes the distributed archives model, examines its advantages and disadvantages, and discusses it in relationship with an increased awareness of social justice concerns in archives, postcustodialism, and shared authority over appraisal between community collection creat...
Local archives and community collecting in the digital age
Archival Science
Abstract Aboriginal communities in Australia have adopted new information technologies in innovative ways. The most well known is the Ara Irititja project software, now increasingly adopted by many local community groups in Australia. These developments demand a policy response from public collecting institutions and governments. There is a raft of opportunities being presented by current archival and record-keeping, and information and record-development programs and activities in Aboriginal communities. These include economic empowerment through the development and distribution of new products; community empowerment through “owning” histories, stories, images and other associated material and being able to manage the context of, and access to this material; and the development of opportunities for young people. Accompanying these opportunities, however, are serious threats to the protection, preservation, collection and use of this material. These threats are both immediate and long-term and include technology changes and format shifting; physical threats to local collections; the lack of IT expertise and archival knowledge; a lack of knowledge or agreement on the archiving system, standards and principles, and many others. This paper proposes that archives held, and being developed in Aboriginal communities, are developed as a nationally distributed collection with community-generated protocols and community-based management, supported within a fully integrated national framework.
Community-Driven Archives: Conocimiento, Healing, and Justice
Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 2021
According to the Arizona Archives Matrix, the Latinx, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community currently make up over 42% of Arizona's population but are only represented in 0-2% of known archival collections. Arizona's archives are dominated by white narratives that promote white supremacy, settler colonialism, and dehumanizes Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) living on this land for centuries. This article will share parts of my autoethnography as a Queer Latinx and archivist who is addressing this inequity and erasure by establishing the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) Initiative at Arizona State University with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Since the project's inception, I embraced a love ethic that uses Gloria Anzaldúa's path to conocimiento as an epistemological framework for our CDA work. In their book This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating reflect on how conocimiento, a Spanish word for consciousness and knowledge, can be used to decolonize the mind, body, and soul of marginalized communities. I believe BIPOC and Queer community archivists experience the seven stages of conocimiento as they learn how to preserve their archives, reclaim their narratives, and build a collective memory that heals historical trauma. The undeniable truth is that decolonizing is an act of deep transformative love, courage, and reflection. A predominantly white profession will never decolonize archives because the foundation of most traditional repositories is rooted in white power and systemic racism. In order to truly liberate archives from oppressive theory and practice, there needs to be a redistribution of power and resources which grants marginalized people the authority to lead community-driven archives.