1.2 Benefits of Community Archives

Community archives are documenting, shaping, and providing access to histories that might otherwise be lost and stories that might go untold, ultimately reclaiming the power to construct community narratives and determine what has value for the present—and the future. By collecting, preserving and making accessible documents, photographs, oral histories and many other records which document the histories of par­ticular groups and localities, community archives and closely related heritage and memory initiatives make invaluable contributions to developing a more inclusive and diverse local and national heritage (Quoted in Gilliland and Flinn 2013, 7). As Kathy Eales writes,

“a key premise of community archiving is to give substance to a community's right to own its own memories” (1998).

Community archives have the potential to positively impact

• individual and collective identities

• representation

• feelings of empowerment

• expand the cultural and political capacities of communities

• improve well-being

• transform archival practice

• serve as vehicles for communication

• advocacy or activism; and more.

We are particularly focused on memory organizations that document, collect, maintain, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with an emphasis on understanding their myriad social, geographic, political, and cultural impacts. Whether or not community archives identify themselves as cultural or political endeavors, the very act of taking control over the documentation and storytelling about one's own community calls attention to issues of power and politics manifest in more traditional approaches to creating and maintaining archives.

Community archives can counter the symbolic annihilation experienced by historically marginalized communities and individuals by offering the tangible and intangible benefits of ‘representational belonging,’ which Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez (2016) define as

“the ways in which community archives empower people who have been marginalized by mainstream media outlets and memory institutions to have the autonomy and authority to establish, enact, and reflect on their presence in ways that are complex, meaningful, substantive, and positive to them in a variety of symbolic contexts.”

These include making decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shaping collective memory of their pasts, and controlling the means through which narratives about them are constructed. Community archives provide important means of self-representation and engender generative spaces for shaping collective memory.

It is at the intersection of ontological, epistemological and social impact that community archives display their greatest value. Research demonstrates that the impact of community archives may fundamentally differ from prevailing conceptions of the impact of mainstream memory institutions.

Given the ways in which community archives are formed in opposition to symbolic annihilation, Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez (2016) argue that they necessitate their own model of impact that centers the needs of marginalized communities. This is not to argue that mainstream archival institutions cannot have an impact on marginalized communities, but rather that the needs and effects of the communities themselves should be centered in any framework for discussing impact.

Further, we cannot assess the impact of community archives without first acknowledging the damaging and pervasive consequences of systems of oppression and the extent to which such organizations are formed to push back against such systems. It is here, in this ‘pushing back’ to dominant forms of representation and exclusion that symbolically annihilate marginalized groups, that community archives showcase their tremendous significance.

Figure 3. A frame from "Salishan: Past, Present, and Future," a film by teacher Bryan Johnson and Lister Elementary School 5th grade students (Community Event Collection, CAC0003, Community Archives Center at Tacoma Public Library).

While acknowledging the important progress made over the last few decades, the urgent need persists for archives to collect the histories of minoritized communities that are still absent or marginalized, to co-design archives to share these stories, and thereby to reshape the historical record. This work is made no easier by a social climate characterized by partisanship and racial conflict, nor by the financial conditions that have eroded support for public libraries and archives (Cifor and Lee, 2017).

There is still a pressing need to expand participation and inclusion through local cultural heritage collections, this toolkit is an applied resource covering best practices for participatory workshop design and implementation, community data collection, creation of community archives, program evaluation, sustainability, and programming aimed at enabling other public libraries to create, support, and/or contribute to building community archives that focus on historically marginalized people and groups in their communities.