Community Archives Research Articles

Community Archives as Agency: Intersectionality as a Framework to Document Chinese American Experiences in the United States

The U.S. has a history of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian. Asian Americans strive for agency in defining their identities. Intertwined with their history of exclusion is the absence and misrepresentation of Asian Americans in archives. In this dissertation, I first explore Chinese Americans’ understanding of their identity and its reflection of social inequality. Then, I investigate what they want to preserve to document their history to counter injustice. Lastly, I examine how Chinese Americans want to use community archives to enhance agency and fight against social injustice. I use interviews, workshops, and ethnographic methods to collect conversations with 17 participants who self-identify as Chinese descendants in the U.S. My dissertation finds that participants’ racial and ethnic identities shape their experiences of discrimination, pressure to assimilate to White society, a lack of belonging, and difficulty fitting into the Asian American Pacific Islander group. Furthermore, gender identity influences their experiences. For example, Chinese American women often face social expectations to prioritize family over themselves. Alongside unjust experiences, community members share lived experiences of resilience, joy, and achievements. My dissertation proposes intersectionality as a framework to understand the representational value of community archives. The intersectionality framework asserts, “it is not enough to simply ‘add race and stir’” (Smooth, 2013). My dissertation finds that participants challenge a thing-oriented approach that prioritizes preservation alone. Instead, they prefer an engagement-oriented approach that uses archives to transform counter-stories into agency, specifically into what Yosso (2005) calls cultural wealth, such as aspirational and social capital.

Documenting the War: American Library Community Supports Ukrainian Colleagues

This project shares experiences of a multi-institutional team of library scholars to document the crimes of Russo-Ukrainian war. It highlights construction of a community archive of Ukrainian libraries affected by the war. The project employs participatory archiving with the Ukrainian partners engaged in collection, appraisal, and description and the U.S. researchers create platforms to preserve, classify and disseminate the knowledge, via digital archive in two languages. The project brings experiences of the war to American audience seeking to end the war and prevent future violence.

The Global Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda

The Iberarchivos program, which is a financial fund for the implementation of archival projects, is a benchmark of archival cooperation in Ibero-America for archival development. Based on the perspectives of culture as a pillar of sustainable development advocated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Quadruple Bottom Line (QBL), the aim of this study is to present the contributions of the Iberarchivos program to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Methodologically, it is an applied, exploratory, and descriptive study in terms of objectives, as well as bibliographic and documentary research in primary sources as technical procedures. After a critical reading of each strategic plan for the Ibero-American partnership (PACCI) for the period of 2019 to 2026, all the initiatives related to the Iberarchivos program for the achievement of sustainable development will be identified and described to map the existence of sustainable practices and actions intended for the Ibero-American archives in their activities. This work has identified efforts and movements that highlight the relevance of guaranteeing the right of access to information, culture, and memory for citizenship and the objectives of the SDGs of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, as well as mobilization with other social sectors for the development and monitoring of cultural public policies. The conclusion of this research is that the contributions of the Iberarchivos program are essential for achieving the SDGs, consolidating the QBL, and, above all, the richness and diversity of Ibero-American culture in building sustainable knowledge for society in general and the archival community, as well as democratizing access to culture.

Envisioning a Paid Community Archives Internship Program: Challenges and Opportunities

This article provides background on community archiving as it relates to a group of faculty members currently working together to address the challenge of reimagining archival education to center non-dominant archival traditions and the restructuring of internship programs to provide financial compensation, by asking how MLIS programs might transform to better serve both minoritized communities and minoritized students. We focus on MLIS Education and Dominant Archival Theories and Practices, to explore the challenges of and possibilities for a large-scale North American effort to support paid internships at community archives.

“Swoop and Grab Your Rights”

Abstract This article centers community archives as sources of history as well as sites of theory to map interconnected social and ecological struggles in the Niti Valley of the central Himalayas from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Tolchha and Marchha communities have integrated different ecological belts over centuries through lifeways of trade, pastoralism, and herb gathering. Colonial and postcolonial policies threatened to sever these lifeways through militarized borders, timber extraction, and the demarcation of the exclusive boundaries of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve. Yet tribal communities have fought to maintain ancestral relations with land by infringing upon colonial restrictions and defying dichotomies of nature and culture through the postcolonial Chipko and Jhapto Cheeno movements. Juxtaposing official archives with community archives from Lata Village, this article argues that leaders of people's movements have sought to reclaim authority over Himalayan history and resituate rural struggles within the framework of Indigenous spatial knowledges.

Drawing as collective self-care: Leeds animation workshop’s collaborative practices during the pandemic

Studies and debates about the impact of the Covid-19 (Covid-19 is the term widely used to denote the SARS-CoV-2 virus and adopted by the World Health Organization when communicating with the public) pandemic on the film and moving image industry have emphasized the economic and cultural consequences of lockdowns and social restrictions on cinematic productions and theatrical and festival circuits, leading to the rise of streaming platforms and services. Within this discussion, little attention has been drawn to the independent sector of non-profit cooperatives or collectives, grassroots distribution companies and community archives involved in feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual+ activism. This essay examines this area of post-pandemic cinema through the example of Leeds Animation Workshop, a women-run, feminist collective. Since its establishment in the eponymous West-Yorkshire city in 1978, the collective has been producing and distributing gender-focused animation films about social and educational issues worldwide. My argument is that Leeds Animation Workshop’s online media activities during the pandemic signal less an adjustment to a new media environment in response to social restrictions than a repurposing of their gendered and participatory media practices for social change and critical intervention.

Emotional Labour and Archival Work

This article looks at my personal experience of working at a small community archives during my co-op placement. Emotional labour is an important aspect of archival work and needs to be examined when understanding how archivists work with the items in the archives as well as with the community. In particular, this article will examine the emotional labour that is involved when sorting through a new collection and interacting with volunteers.

Long-term geomorphic effects of longitudinal training walls in the Grand River, Michigan (USA)

The Grand River is the longest river in Michigan, flowing from northwest Hillsdale County to Lake Michigan, and draining an area over 14,400 km2. Bathymetric surveys of a ~ 38 km reach of the river from Grand Rapids to the confluence with Bass River, performed in 1906, were uncovered in the Grand Rapids Community Archives and Research Center in 2014. These maps show depth recordings across the channel along cross sections spaced ~90 m apart. The maps also show the location of numerous training walls that were built in the river in the 1890's as an effort to maintain navigation. The 1906 maps were georeferenced, and the bathymetric data were digitized, converted to bed elevation, and interpolated into an elevation model of the channel bed. High-resolution multibeam echo sounding surveys were conducted in June 2019 and 2020 over the same reach and provided a means to assess over 100-years of geomorphic changes. The results from these analyses showed substantial changes to the average channel width and width variability, with some locations narrowing by up to 50 % (~90 m). Volumetric difference maps between 1906 and 2020 revealed a streamwise spatial variation in the net erosion and deposition, with upstream reaches being predominantly erosional and downstream reaches exhibiting net deposition, with the transition occurring close to the extent of backwater influence from Lake Michigan. The presence of the training walls also resulted in the development of many mid-channel islands and narrowing of the channel through floodplain accretion. Findings from this study have implications for river management projects that have been proposed for the Grand River, as well as other rivers where these structures might be implemented.

Conceptualizing Records: Community Archives Describing Themselves

ABSTRACT The concept of records is foundational to archival studies, yet empirical research on how members and volunteers of community and grassroots archives conceptualize records remains limited. To understand how members and volunteers of community archives conceptualize records, this study asks how members and volunteers of the Black Bottom Archives (BBA), the Detroit Sound Conservancy (DSC), the Faulkner Morgan Archive (FMA), the Hula Preservation Society (HPS), and The History Project (THP) conceptualize records and how these conceptualizations inform their programs and practices. Based on ten semistructured interviews with five archives in the United States, this research reveals that members and volunteers view records as multifaceted and contingent on ongoing negotiation, borrowing, and intervention for larger goals rather than strictly being tied to abstract, institutional, or professional notions of records. Such a view also points to a recursive and generative relationship between records, programs, and practices and keeping track of power and legitimacy.

Loss and the Production of Community Archives

Abstract This visual essay concerns the generative capacities of loss in the production and maintenance of community archives and archiving communities. In archival sites, the loss of space through the collection of items, as well as degradation and wear and tear, is a concern that traditional archival practice seeks to address, manage, and mitigate. However, through the discussion of two case studies—a participatory arts company in Stoke on Trent and zine archives and libraries in Manchester and Birmingham—loss can materialize as presence, through damp and clutter, evidence of community activity, and debate and discussion. Furthermore, the author argues that loss is generative of archives themselves by drawing from the ongoing work in the two sites, as well as the emergence of archival practice and debates specific to the communities themselves.

An Anthology of Faith-Based Collections’ Writings: Tracking the Genealogy of Scholarship on This Genre of Archives

Faith-based collections, also known as religious archives, church archives or archives of faith traditions, have paradoxically not received attention in mainstream archives. However, they permeate every facet of human endeavour. This could be attributed to this genre of archives as they are relatively unknown; there is a lack of general interest, maybe because of the small volume of archives generated from their parent churches or ministries, which renders them insignificant. Consequently, a definitive and authoritative text on faith-based collections has remained a pipe dream in the records and archives discipline, a global challenge. This paper explores the breadth of the writings to inform the global archival community so that scholars and archivists can contribute in this regard, thereby bridging this literary gap in our archival historiography. Faith-based collections, as they relate primarily to manuscripts of evangelists, are an under-researched area in Archival Science. Using secondary sources like books and reports and empirical works in journals, dissertations, theses, conference proceedings and so on, this paper provides a historical insight and timeline that highlights the trajectory of the scholarship on faith-based collections. While this article highlighted the scholarship on faith-based archives, it also contributed to managing manuscripts by evangelists/pastors in African Independent Churches (AICS) and mainstream churches. It offered insight into the emerging literature on faith-based collections and how this is scattered over various sources.

DIY academic archiving: mischievous disruptions of a new counter-movement

Against increasing injunctions in research governance to create open data, and knee-jerk rejections from qualitative researchers in response to such efforts, we explore a radical counter movement of academics engaged in what we term “DIY Academic Archiving,” the creation of open and accessible archives of their research materials. We turn to interviews with three DIY academic archivists, each drawing on an ethos of community archiving, as opposed to emerging open data schemes: Melissa Munn on The Gaucher/Munn Penal Press Collection,1 Eric Gonzaba’s Wearing Gay History,2 and Michael Goodman’s Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.3 We see these archives as engaged in a “politics of refusal,” which challenges both conventional methods and ethics in qualitative research as well as new moves toward open data. On the one hand, academics are tasked to “protect” their data by destroying it, under the guise of a supposed mode of “care.” On the other hand, open data makes quite contrary demands, to care for data by making it “open” for further extraction through (re)use. DIY Academic Archiving is a practice of refusal that supports a redirection away from this binary. In this article, we explore how DIY academic archivists play with coding as a form of mischievous disruption, and so are contributing to new data imaginaries. We offer insight into how DIY Academic Archiving supports researchers in their theoretical, methodological and political commitments, and at the same time, how it can enable researchers to take the care-full risk of archiving our research data.

From Mammy to Big Mama: Caring for Collections on Our Own Terms

Hallie Q. Brown Community Center (the Center) began as a settlement house in 1929. It has and continues to serve the predominately Black neighborhood, commonly known as Rondo, in Saint Paul, MN. I am the first professional archivist hired by the Center and, as such, I was the first to establish workflows, implement standards, and provide easy access to the Center’s archival collections. Yet, I was trained to be an archivist by white people at predominately white institutions and have learned over time that not all the frameworks, ideas, and expectations impressed upon me apply in community archives which serve Black people. In this paper I will discuss the underappreciated social and emotional labors involved in being a Black woman in charge of a community archive, which serves a historically Black community, and was initially led by Black women. I will explore aspects of internal colonialism, catalog description, and efforts in community collaboration and outreach as it relates to collections entrusted to the Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives (HQBCA). This paper will offer a vignette into the journey of a professional serving the majority as a minority in collections care, to serving an underrepresented community as a fellow member of a marginalized group.

‘We Bounce Off Each Other’s Vibe’: The Importance of Symmetrical Intersubjectivity between Interviewer and Narrator

ABSTRACT The field of oral history has long theorized the intersubjectivities forged between narrators and interviewers, yet there is still a lingering assumption in some oral history literature that the positionality of the interviewer in relation to the narrator does not matter much to the interview process. This article seeks to challenge these assumptions by reporting on empirical data collected via interviews and focus groups with narrators who told their stories as part of two different peer-to-peer oral history programs led by two different community archives centered on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC): Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). In peer-to-peer oral histories, narrators and interviewers share at least some formative experiences and identities, reflecting a relationship of equality rather than extraction. Our findings indicate that, across participants from both organizations, shared positionalities engendered trust, safety, and rapport, creating conditions for life-changing interviews (that is, conversations that resulted in significant realizations and actions in narrators’ lives). Peer-to-peer oral history programs, in which members of minoritized communities interview each other, correct the power imbalance inherent when members of dominant groups interview narrators from minoritized groups. They counter extractive models in which credentialed academics mine minoritized community members as sources. We propose the notion of symmetrical intersubjectivity to describe the ways in which positionalities held in common between narrator and interviewer create the conditions for more honest, rich, and intimate life histories to be shared and recorded.

The Archival Phase in Feminist Organizations: Methodological Suggestions

The article is based on a series of interviews (61) and a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 2019–2021 which traced archival records of 20 feminist organizations in Israel: local women’s peace organizations (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centres (RCCs). We describe the study and the complex methodological concerns and meta-questions relating to the study of feminist community archives in relation to content (types of testimonials or records), method of organization (archival practices like cataloging or digitization) and activists’ perspectives concerning future preservation and access. In order to overcome these challenges, we suggest six methodological principles which may apply to the study of civil society organizations that were established between the 1970s–1990s: the importance of identifying researchers’ positionality vis a-vis the archive; the politics of knowledge and intersectional identities; avoiding judgment of informal archival practices; identifying who sets the rules; silence and self-silencing; and recognition of invisible labor.

Teaching Community Archiving

Teaching Community Archiving

Community archives' role in safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage

Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage is an effort requiring the involvement of the cultural community. This study aimed to describe the role of community archives in safeguarding Silat Sutera Baja as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of DKI Jakarta Province. This study was qualitative research with a case study method. The research data were collected by conducting interviews and documentation studies from May 2023 to July 2023. The informants involved in this study were three people selected using a purposive sampling method. Informants were people involved in the process of the stipulation of Silat Sutera Baja as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Indonesia. They were members of the Silat Sutra Baja community and employees of the local cultural service. Research data analysis was carried out through data reduction by making interview transcripts and coding to answer research questions. The coding findings were then evaluated, interpreted, and confirmed using additional data sources to derive conclusions. Research results showed that community archives, referred to as archival activities, had a role in following the archive life cycle; they were creators, distributors, users, and maintainers. Whereas community archives as collected material played their role as memory and identity. These archives showed Silat Sutera Baja’s identity and their collective memory as part of the Silat Putera Betawi. Based on the results, people need to dissolve archives by converting print archives to digital format and using cloud-based repositories such as Google Drive so that they are not lost.

Reconstruction of archive buildings: the case of Brazil

Discussing the decolonial perspective as an element for the reconstruction of Brazilian public archive buildings is the objective of this article. The guide comes from the assumption of a parameter: architectural constructions of power, encompassed by European colonialism and eclecticism, which influenced perception and building in society, impact the formation of archival science and the construction of archive buildings, especially in the logic that privileges the preservation of State collections and the silence of voices in community archives. The characteristics of basic, bibliographical, and documentary research were studied through an exploratory approach. In doing searches in the Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts databases (LISTA and Scopus of Elsevier), a total of 123 retrieved publications were observed and analyzed by titles, abstracts, and keywords. After applying exclusion criteria, it was possible to select four relevant works for this research. The results identified a local culture as a built environment of representation. In conclusion, decoloniality is a promising starting point for rethinking ways of designing from the connection with local roots.

Researching Latin America in Liverpool: Transnational Connections of Hope and Solidarity

This article examines archival collections at the University of Liverpool and local community archives documenting academic, political, cultural and personal links between Liverpool and Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. Centring on collections related to Chile and Central America between the 1960s and 1990s, the analysis highlights hidden histories of transnational solidarity, human rights campaigns and academic research connecting Liverpool with Latin America during a turbulent period of dictatorship, repression and opposition. The varied records – from institutional papers to exile ephemera and cultural artefacts – provide multilayered grassroots perspectives on resistance in Latin America and abroad, revealing the diverse motivations underpinning local solidarity activism. Ongoing digitization and community collaborations based on these archives underline their contemporary significance for research and education. This article argues that as key sites of exchange across activist, academic and migrant communities in Liverpool the archival collections represent vital tools for preserving diasporic heritage, as well as raising awareness of the importance of solidarity with Latin America.

The Museum of Transology and Radical (Trans) Trust


 
 
 
 In this critical commentary, I reflect on the radical possibilities of trans public history raised by the practices of the London-based Museum of Transology. First, I introduce the museum and its goals. Then, I discuss the museum’s community archiving and rapid response collecting practices in connection with scholarship about the activist and communal implications of such practices. Finally, I connect the museum’s work to the concept of radical (trans) trust, a term that combines the idea of radical trust from the field of public history with interdisciplinary research on trans community, concluding with the benefits of adopting radical (trans) trust on a wider scale in the heritage sector.