“Meaning in the present”: Understanding Sustainability for Digital Community Collections

Abstract

Living independently of mainstream institutions, digital community archives and digital humanities collections confront systemic barriers to medium-and long-term viability. Their sustainability tends to be undermined by shifts in technologies, resources, and communities over time. Because these collections contain irreplaceable and invaluable evidence of communities and histories that are underrepresented in cultural institutions, their fragility compromises the completeness and equity of our collective digital heritage. Partnerships between institutions and community-based collections often founder over a lack of shared understanding: of the expertise each partner brings to the table, of the scope and extent of mutual commitments, and of what sustainability even entails for a given project. This paper reports preliminary outcomes of a case study of the Lakeland Digital Archive, exploring how Lakeland's community understands sustainability in the context of their digital archive, as part of a broader study of community-centered sustainability strategies for digital collections.

Mutual Sustainability among Communities and Their Knowledge Infrastructures

“…Lakelanders are unified around shared identity, history, and memory—as opposed to a community or network of practice formed around intersecting research topics and shared research infrastructure, as in the other cases. In Lakeland, as previously reported in Fenlon et al, 2021, the core conception of sustainability for the community archive is inextricable from the wellbeing of the community itself. The maintenance of social ties within the community, despite its ongoing experience of diaspora, is one of the core objectives of the archive.…”

“…Participants defined the sustainability of their efforts as being realized through the wellbeing or sustainability of their communities, or of individuals within those communities. We originally identified this trend within the Lakeland case (Fenlon et al, 2021), where this sustainability imperative aligned closely with the impetus for the project as a whole—to maintain a community's memory and impact. Our subsequent cross‐case analysis has confirmed the pattern across cases, and it is striking to see this manifest among teams and communities defined around shared research rather than shared memory, where interpersonal commitments might be less intuitive or strong.…”

“…In prior work, we described how participants saw the value of the Lakeland Digital Archive for informing present‐day development decisions related to transportation, zoning, and land use, as the archive documents this historically harmful effects of the creation physical barriers such as high‐rise architecture and train tracks that divided and separated the community from nearby neighborhoods and local amenities (Fenlon et al, 2021). Multiple participants sought to bring the archive's stories to bear on ongoing city strategic planning initiatives.…”

“…Multiple participants sought to bring the archive's stories to bear on ongoing city strategic planning initiatives. Participants acknowledged, however, that leveraging the archive for political purposes carried attendant risks to its sustainability—by inviting political opposition or subjecting the archive to the wax‐and‐wane cycle of broader political interest (Fenlon et al, 2021). The social justice impacts of the archive have since progressed from advocacy to an active restorative justice initiative.…”

“…How do digital, community‐based projects contribute to the wellbeing and endurance of communities themselves? In prior work, which reported a preliminary analysis of a single case study, we observed how one digital community archive serves its community by enhancing social ties as a hub for collaborative effort, and by helping to catalyze activism and advocacy efforts for the community (Fenlon et al, 2021)—outcomes which resonate with the broader literature on community archives as activist spaces, which also support community wellbeing (Treloyn and Emberly, 2013; Cifor et al, 2018; Caswell et al, 2018; Stevens et al, 2010; Flinn et al, 2009). This paper builds on our previous work by examining a fuller set of case studies.…”