National Council on Public History

Connecting with Community Archives

Individuals and community groups are not formally connected to cultural heritage institutions (and subsequently their preservation and access infrastructures) in the way that scholars, corporate researchers, and government employees are. Providing access to the critical resources, knowledge, and tools would allow individuals and community groups interested in preserving their own personal, family, or social histories to be connected to memory organizations and their infrastructures of support, thereby promoting long term access to their community-based heritage on a global scale.

In the absence of these connections, community archives have formed to support access to and preservation of records that describe and represent a particular community. Historically, many underrepresented communities have created archives for use by their members to advocate for their current and historical representation in society. In this way, community archives fill gaps left by traditional formal archives that are usually a function of the state or of the dominant social narrative.

When a community archive is oriented to social justice, it tends to possess these characteristics: it is used by members beyond their evidentiary purpose, it requires control and participation by community members, it is driven by social context rather than neutrality, it supports activism and advocacy for the community, it prioritizes the use of records to support current community information needs rather than long-term preservation, it contains non-traditional acquisitions generated through community member donations, its collections are dictated and developed by community members, and its sustainability is seriously challenged as it is often founded by one or two passionate individuals and it is maintained by volunteers.

Remember, most archivists associated with formal institutions claim to be neutral and objective stewards of history and tend to distance themselves from social justice initiatives. Also, some underrepresented groups have good reason to be distrustful as they have been misrepresented in the past by these very institutions that claim objectivity. Given this past, there are few clear paths available to connect community archives to formal infrastructures of support.

We need methods or models to guide the relationships between formal institutions and community groups who desire to have a voice in their own historical representation. The importance of co-creation in community and personal archives is of key importance. Co-creation is a process that involves all partners learning and benefitting from each other during creative endeavors. In my own work, this relates to the idea of library and information professionals working through their organizations to provide a technical infrastructure and the technical expertise necessary for building and preserving collections, while community members contribute the knowledge, personal information and physical artifacts that support content development.

One model I have explored deals with one of the first significant community-based archaeology projects in Quseir, Egypt. While this framework was designed to guide community control of archaeology projects, I believe it can guide relations between community experts and information experts through community-based documentary projects as well, given the following components: 1) communication and collaboration: 2) employment and training, 3) public presentation, 4) interviews and oral histories, 5) educational resources, 6) photographic and video archive and community controlled merchandising.

I have begun work with two different community groups to develop prototype methods and tools, and to illustrate how an organizing body is needed to facilitate connections to heritage institutions which contain preservation and access infrastructures. The two community groups are the Indianapolis bicycling community and the Bethel AME Church of Indianapolis. These groups exemplify where social history stands to be lost without co-creation efforts between a formal support infrastructure and the knowledge of individual community members.

Over the past several years, the bicycle movement in Indianapolis has gained a great deal of momentum. Seventy-four miles of bicycle lanes and trails have been designed and implemented to support travel by bike. In the case of the city’s bicycling community, records are being created in comments sections of blogs and online newspaper articles, and include personal snapshots and reflections published via social media platforms that are of a troublingly ephemeral nature. The bicycle movement in Indianapolis presents an ideal issue around which to develop a community heritage collection, as the geographic and mobile nature of the phenomenon will expose the challenges of capturing both place-bound and digital history as it is happening. Information regarding the movement is current and thus is mostly in a digital form.

The Bethel AME Church was founded in Indianapolis in 1836. Since its inception, the Church has played a vital role in the African American community. Early members assisted escaping slaves in the Underground Railroad, founded the NAACP in Indiana, founded and contributed to the first formal school for African-American children in Indianapolis, and the development of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. Many factors, including urban development, have displaced members from the surrounding area. Over the years, Bethel’s membership has dwindled and the majority of its parishioners are now elderly. These church members provide the contextual narrative supporting over a hundred years of physical documentary evidence. Bethel’s Keeper of History, Olivia McGee-Lockhart, has spent her life caring for the church archive. As the church parish continues to dwindle, it is increasingly unlikely that someone will inherent her role. A professional archivist and formal archive is needed to ensure the survival of these important historical documents, along with digitization. Through the use of online community engagement tools, former and current church members would be able to provide the historical narrative to accompany the digitized documents. Their online contributions would provide documentation akin to that of oral histories.

In both instances, the time is now to capture and preserve the human narrative vital to our shared community heritage. Unfortunately, there is no connection from either of these communities to a library or archive, technology tools, or the professional expertise needed to document and preserve this heritage; this would indicate that there are numerous other communities disconnected as well. I only learned of the Bethel archive because an African-American librarian attending the church found out about my research and contacted me for help in finding ways to preserve the archive. It’s been two years now, and I’m happy to report that through extensive relationship building, representatives from IUPUI University Library, the Indiana Historical Society, the Indiana State Museum, the Bethel AME Church, and the Department of Library and Information Science are all working together to preserve, facilitate access to, and promote community engagement with the Church’s archive.

~ Andrea Copeland, Indiana University

Copeland, A. (2015). Community archives. In Annual Review of Cultural Heritage Informatics, edited by Samantha K. Hastings.
Copeland, A. (2015). Public Library: A place for the digital community archive. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 44(1), 12-21.
Moser, S., et al. (2002). Transforming archaeology through practice: Strategies for collaborative archaeology and the Community Archaeology Project Quesire, Egypt. World Archaeology, 34(2), 220-48.

Discussion