Community Archives Research Articles

Radical Curating, Black Community Archives and the Sir George Williams Affair

This article explores strategies employed in the 2019 archival exhibition Protests and Pedagogy: Representations Meanings and Memories. The exhibition was organized to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Sir George Williams Affair, when Canadian students protested racism in the classroom at Concordia University. Using the curatorial process as a case study in radical pedagogy allows a rare glimpse into the archival records of the 1969 event. The case demonstrates ways in which an engaged approach to curating connects with the building of a community archive that enables a rereading of these events. The exhibition’s pedagogical practices allow reflection on alternative methodologies that challenge teaching-learning through community dialogue.

Mutual Sustainability among Communities and Their Knowledge Infrastructures

ABSTRACTDigital, community‐based knowledge infrastructures confront complex, systemic challenges to their sustainability over time. From digital community archives to computationally amenable corpora, databases, or data models created by and serving research communities, these sites of grassroots knowledge production tend to be maintained without long‐term institutional commitments. Yet, they hold unique cultural evidence of enormous value. Prior work on the sustainability of digital humanities scholarship has surfaced numerous factors in project sustainability, including technical, organizational, and financial concerns. The roles of communities themselves in sustaining community‐based knowledge infrastructures, however, are under‐studied. This qualitative, multi‐case study of digital humanities projects and digital community archives addresses community‐centered approaches to understanding and implementing sustainability for digital knowledge infrastructures. This study finds that communities of various kinds—from public communities to networks of research practice—conceive of the sustainability of their digital projects as inextricably linked to the sustainability of communities themselves. We offer an exploration of factors in the mutual relationship of sustainability between communities and their knowledge infrastructures, including how they support the wellbeing of individuals and cohesion among communities, and how they promote activism and advocacy efforts within broader publics and disciplinary cultures.

WI scrapbooks and community archives: women’s experiences of record-keeping in 1960s rural England

ABSTRACT 1965 marked the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Women’s Institute (WI), which some members commemorated by making a scrapbook recording village life in England and Wales. As this competition shows, scrapbooks were just as appealing to community organizations such as the WI, as they were to individuals and families, yet it is the latter who have attracted the most scholarly interest. I reorientate this focus to argue that scrapbooks have historically functioned as community archives, inaugurating WI women into becoming their villages’ record-keepers, as they recorded what it meant to them to live in the English countryside in the 1960s. In their submissions, WI women reflected on the opportunities and challenges of creating an archive, allowing a rare insight into the experiences of grassroots record-keeping by an overlooked group of community archivists. By focusing on members of the WI, a largely conservative, countryside organization, this article diversifies both the sites of community archives, as well as the demographics of those who participated in community archival practices.

The archive and the cafezinho: challenging (disembodied) histories by embodied archival experiences at Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive in Brazil

ABSTRACT This article examines the challenges faced by Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive located in São Paulo, Brazil. Departing from the observation of a disconnect between the recognition of the archive’s importance in terms of the content it holds and its consideration as a community epistemological project, the article argues for a paradigm shift in understanding archives. Contrariwise, the article proposes viewing Acervo Bajubá as an epistemological project that challenges conventional notions of community, history, and memory. It calls for a re-evaluation of the archive’s material conditions, bringing them to the forefront, and operating a recognition of its role as a legitimate knowledge producer – and not only as a repository for disciplinary projects and commitments. The article suggests that by expanding the concept of the archive-as-object and embracing archive-as-community-practice, alternative relationships with the past can be forged. Finally, through the analysis of two art-pieces produced in the context of an inventory process, the article argues for a concept and practice of archive that challenges disembodied notions of history, memory, and community, emphasising community practice and recognising the lives and bodies embedded within archival devices. It concludes by highlighting the importance of grounding the archive in the present time, and fostering creative tactics for envisioning alternative historical imaginaries and political repertoires.

Pioneers in Maltese archives and libraries: people, contexts and institutions in 20th-century Malta

ABSTRACT This contribution shares the first findings and methodological approaches emerging from a research project aiming at exploring how 20th-century archives and libraries in Malta were perceived and in turn shaped by people who engaged and dedicated their lives to their mission. The project also intends to reconstruct the early embryonic development of the profession in Malta, provide a better understanding of the custodial history of archival and library collections on the island, and contribute to the recent local development of university-level archival and library education. To retrace the steps of this pathway through the lens of the changes that are currently happening in Maltese holding institutions, extensive archival research and semi-structured interviews are held in collaboration with the community archive project Memorja (National Archives of Malta). The project will also lay the foundations to trace back the history of Maltese archives and libraries through the 19th century.

“Archival Mentalities,” Multiculturalism, and the Canadian Context: Identifying the Value and Impact of the Ontario Jewish Archives

ABSTRACT Within the last decade, interest in community archives has increased in the field of archival studies. Calls to evaluate programs and services have caused scholars and archival professionals to seek new ways to understand how effectively a program or organization performs, to gather input for evidence-based decision-making, and to demonstrate an organization's impact on its community or stakeholders beyond traditional evaluative measures. This article is based on a two-year partnership study with the Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre (OJA) in Toronto, Ontario. In conjunction with OJA staff, the researchers sought to identify effective methodologies that shed light on OJA's impact. Informed by recent archival theories on impact and a critical understanding of OJA's organizational culture as well as the Ontario Jewish community's history, the authors argue that OJA's impact and value as articulated by members of the community must be contextualized within what Amir Lavie calls an “archival mentality”—in this case, one grounded in Canada's history of multiculturalism as a policy and as a national identity.

Activating Personal Counter-Archives: The Case of the Amir Hassanpour Fonds

ABSTRACT In this article, through a historical and theoretical reflection on the Amir Hassanpour Fonds, held at the University of Toronto, the author investigates the role of personal and community archives in counter-archiving in the Middle East, especially in Iran. He expands on his experience working on appraising, describing, and arranging the Amir Hassanpour Fonds at the University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services (UTARMS) to argue that archiving a diasporic and revolutionary counter-archive calls for more than a procedural and habitual institutional practice. To activate such a counter-archive, there should be, first, close attention paid to the memory institutions against which the counter-archive has been developed. Such close attention calls for an investigation into the larger political structures in which the memory institutions are embedded. Second, the counter-archive should be understood in the broader modes and methods of cultural and memory resistance in that specific political structure, engaging analytically and theoretically with the creator's counter-archiving praxis, in this case Amir Hassanpour's Marxist internationalist revolutionary approach. The article ends with a brief discussion of the various ways UTARMS attempted to enliven this specific fonds.

Film Preservation in the Digital Era: Pitfalls and Potentials

This paper highlights the pitfalls and potentials of digitization of film heritage in the archival domain. The largest issue encountered by the global archive community would be the recent transition from analog to digital technology in the capture, post-production, and distribution of cinematographic works. Due to the emergence of new platforms for access and the fact that digital copies are not susceptible to the same wear and tear as analogue film elements, digitization of historical films has the potential of enabling access on a larger scale. The conflict between the necessity to preserve originals and the need to offer access has been somewhat lessened by digitization. By acting as stand-ins for quick access or as backup copies in case original materials are lost or damaged, digital versions serve preservation functions. Also, negatives that are losing their information value can be preserved by digitization in order to extend access to them and preserve their content. The value of digitization as a preservation tactic has been hotly contested. Despite the benefits of digitization, there are significant technological, legal, financial, and curatorial obstacles or pitfalls that must be addressed in order to realize the potentials.

Towards Feminist Listening: Community Archives, Feminist Servers, and Corporate Tech Imaginaries

Towards Feminist Listening: Community Archives, Feminist Servers, and Corporate Tech Imaginaries

Wytyczne dotyczące przeprowadzania kontroli postępowania z dokumentami elektronicznymi jako wynik zmian postulowanych przez środowisko archiwistów

The emergence of legal acts on the computerisation of public administration in Poland, the spread of electronic documentation and various types of IT tools and electronic document management systems have not always improved the performance of office activities and the documentation of cases. The lack of guidance on the rules for archival audits of electronic records, which are collected, produced and stored differently in the organisational units under archival supervision, has resulted in a marked diversity in the verification and description of data collected during archival audits. The article includes examples of problems raised by the archives community and attempts to analyse guidelines for carrying out controls on the handling of electronic documents.

Gossip as Practice, Gossip as Care

Often seen as suspect and untrustworthy, gossip as it is currently conceptualized comes from historic attempts by people who have experienced social marginalization to share information, build stronger relationships, and assess a dominant narrative against lived experience. In this article, I will be outlining how gossip has animated my archival work at the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archives, an artist-run centre in Vancouver, BC, and using the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archives as a case study. Several distinct uses of gossip emerge: these include offering space for archives workers to connect and build solidarity, opening up new avenues for reassessing what we consider to be relevant information in archival description, providing strategies for navigating sensitive information within collections, and acting as an alternative to narratives of trauma when considering archival silences. Drawing on practice theory and studies of community archives and deeply influenced by an ethos of transformative justice, this project is connected to the growing body of scholarly work that examines information and memory work through the lens of affect theory and a feminist ethics of care. This work contributes to the articulation of person-centred archival praxis by theorizing gossip as a tactic of care that trains the ear to better notice the experiences, complaints, and contributions of the people surrounding the records at hand.

Learning about Sharing Authority With the Gathered Voices of Malmö

ABSTRACT For more than two years we were involved in a collaborative process with the aim of finding out how sharing life stories could ensure “the right to the city” in Malmö, Sweden. This process led to the formation of the Gathered Voices of Malmö, an association for social justice oral history that strives to become a community archive. This article is about how sharing authority was interpreted collectively in the collaborative process when it could not be directly translated into Swedish, and how those interpretations reflect back on sharing authority as an intellectual development. Drawing upon documents created during the collaborative process and interviews with our coparticipants, we revisit what we learned, including our rereading of sharing authority’s genealogy through project-based research. As participants in, and then analysts of, that process, we learned that our trouble with translating sharing authority was not only linguistic, but also had to do with how the approach might conceal community-embedded ways of working, instead normalizing participatory practices which center research rather than community as the primary sphere in which important learnings are made. We suggest that a deeper consideration of the differences between “a shared authority” and “sharing authority” could help us avoid making participation the best practice.

Black lives and the ‘archival pulse’: the murder of Neil “Tommy” Marsh and other stories

ABSTRACT 16-year-old Neil ‘Tommy’ Marsh was murdered in the Birmingham Pub Bombings. A recent immigrant from Jamaica, Tommy came to Britain to join his family in Handsworth. Now he is the only 1 of the 21 pub bombing victims for whom there is not a single photograph. When pictures of the other victims are displayed, Tommy is represented by a silhouette, or by an image of his mother in mourning at his grave. The absence of material to document Tommy Marsh’s life in Britain speaks to a deeper lacuna of Black British lives within government records, mainstream public accounts and even public histories. Where records of Black lives exist, they are frequently built from foundations of Black people’s encounters with the state, perpetuating structural racism through white recordings of Black lived experiences. This article will use Tommy Marsh’s case to question how the fragmented documentary and community archives of Black life in Britain offer methodological insights into history as/and recovery. It will discuss the extent to which it is possible to construct historical narratives of Black life that acknowledge and speak from that for which government and public records fail to provide an account. Drawing from the work of scholars including Michel Rolph-Trouillout, Saidiya Hartman and Ann Laura Stoler, we will interrogate the processes of archival production and offer a critical examination of archives produced in the aftermath of injury, violence and death. We question the potentials and limitations of the spaces that can be mined by historians, and how appropriate they are for the production of historical knowledge. In doing so, we probe the extent to which alternative archives curated at the individual, family and community level may potentially support the recovery of the histories of Black British communities and individuals.

Finding Minority Voices in Early Modern European Archives

ABSTRACTSince the rise of postmodernism and the archival turn in the mid-nineteen nineties with the writings of Jacques Derrida and others, much scholarship has been dedicated to the question ‘who is not represented in the archives?’ Indeed, suggested changes and alterations to traditional archival practice include the incorporation of newer models like social provenance, oral history testimonies, shared-stewardship, and community archives. While this wealth of attention and consideration towards creating more inclusive archives today are sorely needed, what can be done for archives of more distant pasts? In this article, I evaluate a number of different scholarly works which address, or demonstrate, the issue of finding minority voices in early modern archives specifically. Whether through the study of works of art, literature, or legal, government documents, these authors either find ways to breathe life into past histories once assumed to be utterly lost, or their problematic analyses uncover potential for using such methods.

Borderland's theory in indigenous ethnic community archiving

The main purpose of this article is to bring to the fore the nexus between what borderlands theory stands for and the mushrooming of community archives in these areas as a form of counter-archiving and documenting the ‘other’. Zimbabwe's borderlands are uniquely inhabited by the marginalised ethnic indigenous groups of people. This prevalent borderland phenomenon has seen the growth of community archives which border on archival activism. Therefore, this article, through literature review interrogates further this borderland phenomenon by giving an overview picture of the nexus between community archives and Zimbabwe's borderlands. One of the findings reveals that these community archives which come in different formats such as archives, museums, trusts, oral history groups and language associations seem to be a counter move by the marginalised to tell their stories which are side-lined by those in power. It is now almost axiomatic to conclude that the stories of those in borderlands are scarcely documented in the mainstream heritage institutions in Zimbabwe. Also, one of the leitmotifs which runs through the article is how the concepts of Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) are used by community archives in borderlands to further their objectives.

Genealogical Data Mining from Historical Archives: The Case of the Jewish Community in Pisa

The Jewish community archive in Pisa owns a vast collection of documents and manuscripts that date back centuries. These documents contain valuable genealogical information, including birth, marriage, and death records. This paper aims to describe the preliminary results of the Archivio Storico della Comunita Ebraica di Pisa (ASCEPI) project, with a focus on the extraction of data from the Nati, Morti e Ballottati (NMB) Registry document in the archive. The NMB Registry contains about 1900 records of births, deaths, and balloted individuals within the Jewish community in Pisa. The study uses a semiautomatic pipeline of digitization, transcription, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract personal data such as names, surnames, birth and death dates, and parental names from each record. The extracted data are then used to build a knowledge base and a genealogical tree for a representative family, Supino. This study demonstrates the potential of using NLP and rule-based techniques to extract valuable information from historical documents and to construct genealogical trees.

Issues in Community Archives Research

Since their rise over half a century ago, community archives have filled in the gaps that mainstream archives have knowingly or unknowingly left, preserving the history of typically marginalized groups on their own terms. But it is only in the past decade or two that scholars have begun seriously contending with community archives, a timeline that perhaps not coincidentally overlaps with the archival profession’s increased focus on its own role in perpetuating power relations and systems of oppression. How has the so-called traditional archival community conceived of its relationship to both power and community archives, and what potential do community archives hold to help the archival field rectify its history of exclusion? Through a review of trends in the current literature on the topic, this paper will explore community archives as an alternative to traditional archival practice. Ultimately, this paper will argue for a reconceptualization of community archives as part of the archival continuum rather than as traditional or mainstream archives’ binary opposite. If archives and archival professionals want to begin to grapple with their legacy of power and exclusion, rethinking how we conceptualize archival working taking place outside of the academy and traditional heritage sector is a promising place to begin.

Situating Community Archives Along the Continuum of Community-Engaged Archival Praxis: Autonomy, Independence, and the Archival Impulse

Community archives is a widely used concept in both archival scholarship and the archival profession, yet, to date the concept lacks a clear and consistent definition. In attempts to increase inclusivity in the community archives paradigm, scholars have refused to offer a strict definition for the term, resulting in the conflation of community archives and community-based archival practices occurring in institutional repositories. This article reviews the definitions offered in the growing body of community archives literature and offers a reframing of the umbrella concept of community archives through the lens of community engagement. In applying the principles of Arstein’s Ladder, a framework that describes the level of citizen engagement in public planning projects, the authors offer the Continuum of Community-Engaged Archival Praxis that articulates the distinction between community archives and other archival practices that fall on a spectrum of community-based archival projects. Returning to earlier definitions of community archives that center on the autonomy of the community, they ground community archives in the concept of the archival impulse as a means for identifying the impetus of a community-engaged archival project and the directionality of the control over the archives. The continuum and impulse provide a means for disambiguating the myriad concepts that fall under the moniker of “community” and for more clearly defining the relationship between institutional repositories and the communities that they seek to engage.

Ukrainian Community Archives in Victoria, Australia: A Stocktake

Contemporary research increasingly recognizes the role of community archives in preserving evidence of the pasts of identity groups, validating their historical experience, and thus furthering the goals of social justice and equality. Such values underlie the Association of Ukrainians in Victoria (Australia) Archival Project, which the present article places into the broader context of Ukrainian community archival collections in the state of Victoria. Data obtained through interview have enabled a descriptive survey of such collections, which are found to be concentrated in a handful of “archival clusters” in suburban Melbourne and regional Victoria. The most typical contents of the collections—records of the proceedings and activities of community secular and religious organizations—reflect the dominant role in the community’s life of organizations established by post-World War II immigrants. The collections constitute a rich resource for research into the part of the community encompassed by these organizations, even if, as a rule, at least at present, they are not well ordered or described. They are less revealing of the experience of immigrants who arrived later or were less inclined to join community organizations. Lack of resources, both human and material, confronts the mainly volunteer officeholders who are responsible for the organizations’ archives. In consequence, collections are often inadequately and sometimes unsafely housed, and in general only informally organized; finding aids or descriptions of them are seldom available. Initiatives taken by some organizations suggest that there is growing awareness among community activists of the potential value of archives for showing and interpreting the community to itself and to others.

Fearless Steps APOLLO: Challenges in keyword spotting and topic detection for naturalistic audio streams

Fearless Steps (FS) APOLLO is a + 50,000 hr audio resource established by CRSS-UTDallas capturing all communications between NASA-MCC personnel, backroom staff, and Astronauts across manned Apollo Missions. Such a massive audio resource without metadata/unlabeled corpus provides limited benefit for communities outside Speech-and-Language Technology (SLT). Supplementing this audio with rich metadata developed using robust automated mechanisms to transcribe and highlight naturalistic communications can facilitate open research opportunities for SLT, speech sciences, education, and historical archival communities. In this study, we focus on customizing keyword spotting (KWS) and topic detection systems as an initial step towards conversational understanding. Extensive research in automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech activity, and speaker diarization using manually transcribed 125 h FS Challenge corpus has demonstrated the need for robust domain-specific model development. A major challenge in training KWS systems and topic detection models is the availability of word-level annotations. Forced alignment schemes evaluated using state-of-the-art ASR show significant degradation in segmentation performance. This study explores challenges in extracting accurate keyword segments using existing sentence-level transcriptions and proposes domain-specific KWS-based solutions to detect conversational topics in audio streams. [Work Sponsored by NSF via Grant No. 2016725 and EU’s Horizon 2021 R&I Program under MSC Grant No. 101062614.]