Participatory Archives Research Articles

The Worry Box Project: An archive of maternal worries: an ongoing participatory archiving project

The Worry Box Project: An archive of maternal worries: an ongoing participatory archiving project

Revolutionary Libraries: Building Collections and Promoting Research about the January 25th Uprising in Egypt

This paper describes the efforts made by the American University in Cairo's (AUC) Library to preserve the history and scholarship of the January 25th Revolution. In direct response to the uprising, AUC imagined University on the Square: Documenting Egypt's 21st Century Revolution, a participatory archives initiative that ‘seeks to preserve the momentous events of early 2011’ and ‘events as they unfold’ (American University in Cairo, 2011a). Librarians focused on improving revolution-focused book collections, simultaneously promoting the use of its research and instructional design services. Archivists worked to collect the outpouring of student projects, graduate theses, and faculty publications analysing the January 25th Revolution.

Community Health Workers Working the Digital Archive: A Case for Looking at Participatory Archiving in Studying Stigma in the Context of HIV and AIDS

Addressing the issue of HIV-stigma is recognised as essential to reducing the spread of HIV and AIDS, enabling community members to access prevention, treatment and care. Often the very people who are able to contribute to solving the problem, are marginalised and do not see ways to insert themselves into dialogues related to combating stigma. Community health workers in rural South Africa are one such group. At the heart of the research discussed in this article is an intervention based on participatory analysis through participatory archiving ( Shilton and Srinivasan 2008 ). Drawing on participatory work with thirteen community health workers in rural KwaZulu-Natal, we use a digital archive containing HIV-stigma visual data - generated five years earlier by youth in the community - to engage the participants in the analysis. Drawing on such participatory work as Jenkins’ participatory cultures framework, we focus on the idea of re-using, re-coding, and re-mixing visual data. One participant stated that “these pictures talk about the real issues faced by our communities”, highlighting the value of resources generated by community members themselves. They also indicate that they “could use [the resources] to teach the cons of stigmatising”. A key concern in work related to visual images (particularly in projects such as ours where a large amount of visual data is produced) is to consider ways of extending its life through the use of community-based digital archives.

Revolutionary Digitization: Building a Participatory Archive to Document the January 25th Uprising in Egypt

Revolutionary Digitization: Building a Participatory Archive to Document the January 25th Uprising in Egypt

Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management

User perspective and user studies have received noticeably little practical attention in archives and archival science. The purpose of this article is to address the issues of communication and user participation in archival contexts. Two action research projects-based digital archives are discussed. The insights gained during the research and development work are used to formulate a new approach to a participatory archive. In spite of the historical nature of the archives discussed, the suggested ways of interacting with an archive are not specific to historical records. The fundamental characteristics of the proposed approach are decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and contextualisation of both records and the entire archival process.