Research by Subject: Community Archives: Home

What are Community Archives?

Community archives "often coalesce around a marginalized identity, including ethnic, racial and religious identities, as well as sexual and gender orientation, political affiliaction, economic status and physical locations. These archives are often formed in reaction to the failure of mainstream archives to tell the accurate and complex stories of marginalized communities, resulting in mistrust of those institutions. Community-based organizations and projects invite and empower communities to have a stake in their own history, often through practices that value and encourage the participation of the users and larger communities. Such organizations may vary in size, governance structure, financial capacity, relationship to dominant institutions, and the nature of the identity and community being documented. Yet, community archives are uniter in their insistence that marginalized communities take ownership of their own historical representations as a means of empowerment."

Caswell, M., Gabiola, J., Brilmyer, G., Zavala, J. & Tai, J. (2018, November). Assessing the Affective Impact of Community Archives: A Toolkit. https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/toolkit/

Readings on Community Archives

"To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing": Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives by Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, Mario H. Ramirez
Call Number: Available digitally via link.
Although much published work assumes that independent community archives have an important impact on communitiets, little research has been done to assess this impact empirically. This article begins to fill this gap by reporting the results of a series of qualitative interviews with academic members of one ethnic community regarding their responses to one community archives.
Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices by Simon Popple (Editor); Andrew Prescott (Editor); Daniel Mutibwa (Editor)
Call Number: Available digitally via link.
This innovative book examines the changing relationship between communities, citizens and the notion of the archive. Archives have traditionally been understood as repositories of knowledge and experience, remote from the ordinary people who fund and populate them, however digital resources have led to a growing plurality of archives and the practices associated with collecting and curating.
Identity Palimpsests by Dominique Daniel (Editor); Amalia Levi (Editor)
Call Number: Available digitally via link.
Identity Palimpsests assesses the ways ethnic identities and other forms of belonging are affected by current practices in ethnic archiving. The book begins with an overview of the evolution of the ways ethnic organizations and communities have collected, preserved and provided access to their heritage.
Urgent Archives by Michelle Caswell
Call Number: Available digitally via link.
Urgent Archives argues that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal archival solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description.　 Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, this book uncovers how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design, while looking toward the the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices.