Community archives

Community archives are archives created or accumulated, described, and/or preserved by individuals and community groups who desire to document their cultural heritage based on shared experiences, interests, and/or identities,[1] sometimes without the traditional intervention of formally trained archivists, historians, and librarians. Instead, the engaged community members determine the scope and contents of the community archive, often with a focus on a significant shared event, such as the Ferguson unrest (2014).[2] Community archives are created in response to needs defined by the members of a community, who may also exert control over how materials are used.[3][4]

Although local and regional societies, churches, and museums have collected community records for generations, community archives increased in number and popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s,[1] which Anne Gilliland and Andrew Flinn believe may be due in part to increased interest in oral history and community representation in response to the emerging anti-war, anti-establishment, civil rights, and student activism movements of the 1960s.[5]

The work of community archives received little recognition from archival scholars until the early 2000s, when several published studies explored the relationships between communities, archives, and collective memory.[1] Jeannette Bastian’s Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History[6] is considered[by whom?] to be one of the most significant of these publications. Bastian discusses the experience of the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Virgin Islanders' efforts to rebuild their “house of memory”[6] after losing local control of nearly all governmental documents and records to their historical and current colonial rulers. Bastian's work introduces several key concepts, including the notion of a "community of records" to acknowledge that communities are entities that both create records and whose input is needed to contextualize the records they create.

  1. ^ a b c Currents of archival thinking. Eastwood, Terry, 1943-, MacNeil, Heather. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited. 2010. ISBN 9781591586562. OCLC 422757095.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  2. ^ "Documenting Ferguson". digital.wustl.edu. Retrieved 2018-02-08.
  3. ^ Flinn, Andrew; Stevens, Mary; Shepherd, Elizabeth (2009). "Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream". Archival Science. 9 (1–2): 71–86. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2. S2CID 144712917.
  4. ^ Duranti, Luciana; Franks, Patricia C. (2015-06-17). Encyclopedia of Archival Science. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780810888111.
  5. ^ Gilliland, Anne; Flinn, Andrew (2013). "Community Archives: what are we really talking about?" (PDF). CIRN Prato Community Informatics Conference 2013 – via Keynote Speech.
  6. ^ a b Allis., Bastian, Jeannette (2003). Owning memory : how a Caribbean community lost its archives and found its history. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited. p. 13. ISBN 9780313320088. OCLC 57492142.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)