“To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives¹

Abstract

Abstract:Although there has been much work published that assumes that independent community archives have an important impact on communities, little research has been done to empirically assess this impact. This research paper begins to fill in this gap by reporting on the results of a series of qualitative interviews with academic members of one ethnic community regarding their responses to one community archives. More specifically, this study reports on interviews conducted with South Asian American educators regarding their responses to the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), an independent nonprofit community-based organization that operates the websites www.saadigitalarchive.org. and www.firstdaysproject.org. The study reports on several emergent themes: the absence of or difficulty in accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA; the affective and ontological impact of discovering SAADA for the first time; the affective impact of SAADA on respondents' South Asian American students; and SAADA's ability to promote feelings of inclusion both within the South Asian American ethnic community and in the larger society. Together, these 1 The authors would like to thank Anne Gilliland, Ricardo Punzalan, and Gregory Leazer for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and all of the respondents for their participation.1 responses suggest the ways in which one community archives counters the symbolic annihilation of the community it serves, and instead produces feelings of what we term "representational belonging." The paper concludes by exploring the epistemological, ontological, and social levels of representational belonging.

Building the National Radio Recordings Database: A Big Data Approach to Documenting Audio Heritage

“…Those same limited resources can also make successful documentation of these collections particularly challenging, creating a cycle of invisibility that impedes effective preservation and use of these materials. To that end, we believe that the RPTF has much to learn from the growing body of work on community-based archiving [23].…”

Archivists as Peers in Digital Public History

“…Michelle Caswell and others suggest that by opening up the process of producing the archive, by making the production of an archive participatory, archives can serve communities by helping to create a sense of belonging. 22 As archives and archival practice continues to increase engaging with communities of users as participants and co-producers of archival work and practices, the potential alignment between the work of digital public history and archives becomes stronger. At the same time, the lines between the work of historians as interpreters and archivists as enablers of access blurs further.…”

‘A process where we’re all at the table’: community archives challenging dominant modes of archival practice

“…In their work, Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor and Mario H Ramirez express that community archives can be alternatives to mainstream repositories 'through which communities can make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shape collective memory of their own pasts, and control the means through which stories about their past are constructed' . 8 The VIA (Voice, Identity, Activism) framework proposed by Anne Gilliland incorporates lessons across community archives projects to define a values-based structure for approaching these endeavours holistically. Gilliland asserts that a community-based approach to archival practice is characterised by centring the interests, needs and well-being of a community; respecting and acknowledging that community records and materials are respected and understood in the context of their creation, rather than being seen by mainstream institutions as collectibles, 'salvage' projects, or tools for institutional diversification; and shifting community dynamics, including honouring diverse 'interests, epistemologies, demographics and emotions' .…”