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.
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