Recuerdos Hablados /Memories Spoken: Toward the Co-Creation of Digital Knowledge with Community Significance

Abstract

Collaborative relationships among libraries, archives, and museums can fruitfully engage cultural community members in collaborative construction of digital knowledge. A continuum of co-creation approaches in the Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library illustrates the value of working together. The most mature community-generated initiative produces digital images with contextualizing metadata of cultural "significance." Examples suggest that inclusive, community-generated digital knowledge activities can shape interpretations and narratives of the past and present, thereby influencing construction of the future, as community members express their contexts, concepts, and truths. Concluding remarks consider implications for community-generated digital knowledge activities that give "voice" to underrepresented populations and suggest new directions for organizational purpose and professional practice.

Preface

“…This initiative empowers communities to create their own digital stories which consequently function as a means to express a community's cultural identity or, as Soren (2005: 140) maintains, create links between communities. This is confirmed also by Somerville and EchoHawk (2011) in their description of a continuum of co-creation approaches in the Center for Colorado and the West at Auraria Library where community members gradually determined the narratives, directions and values expressed in co-curation activities that aimed at preserving their cultural memories (Somerville and EchoHawk 2011: 652). Indeed, the rapid growth of new technologies and social media, together with the endeavour of museums to remain relevant today, as 'relevance' in challenged by the Web 2.0 social networking and knowledge production technologies (ibid: 660), are increasingly leading to digital co-created and co-curated projects, the practice of which has not though been theorised and critically reflected.…”

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Co-creation

“…Indeed, co-creation can provide opportunities to reciprocally enrich a community and institution with skills and experiences, while facilitating the preservation of traditional culture. Through co-creation of themes and content, and collaborative shaping of its interpretations from conception to execution, it is possible for museums to more effectively communicate and help preserve the living culture surrounding its collections, as well as build cultural agency and strength within both the community and museum (Somerville & EchoHawk, 2011).…”

Positioning Libraries for a New Bibliographic Universe

“…61 As an example of the social constructivist approach, the Center for Colorado and the West at Auraria Library worked with members of Native American tribes and the Latino community to provide enhanced descriptions of digitized materials. 62 Other articles by Anfinnsen, Ghinea, and de Cesare, Lee and Schleyer, and Stvilia, Jörgensen, and Wu explore how user-generated tags and folksonomies can complement, but not replace, controlled vocabularies. 63 LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) provides a corpus of social tags to incorporate into library catalogs.…”