2.1 Tips & Tricks

A marathon, not a sprint

In this chapter, we describe some of the earliest steps necessary to plan and launch your own community archive. First and foremost, we include some tips, tricks, and lessons we learned and carried in our practices throughout this extended planning process (i.e. breathe and drink water!).

Then we will discuss the first action that will also continue as a thread throughout the entire toolkit—building community partnerships. Take opportunities early and often to build relationships that support the creation, use, and sustainability of your archive. In section 2.2 Find Initial Partners, we describe why community partnerships are so important when creating a community archive. Section 2.3 Establish Funding and Support shifts to another important topic—finding the resources you need in order to create your archive. Specifically, we discuss strategies for winning grants to support your archive, as well as non-grant opportunities that you might use to support your project. Section 2.4 Build and Sustain Community and Partner Engagement then returns to the topic of community partnerships, and describes some of the steps that we took to build additional partnerships after we obtained funding for our project. Section 2.5 Build Team Capacity moves on to discuss how we built our own team capacity to carry out the project. Section 2.6 Design the Archive describes some of the considerations that went into designing the vision for our archive, and section 2.7 Ethics, Permissions, and Copyrights describes some of the policies and forms that we developed to support the collection of materials for our archive. By the end of this chapter, we hope that these sections will provide you with everything you need to successfully plan for the creation of your own community archive!

Figure 4. The first page of a family history letter digitized at an African American Family History Event in Tacoma, February 2023. (Community Event Collection, CAC0003, Community Archives Center at Tacoma Public Library).

We learned a lot of lessons about how to plan for and launch a community archive. As our project continued, so did the learning for the team. This was especially true in realizing that flexibility continued to be critical even after some initially successful efforts. Hopefully some of these lessons will help you to avoid some of the missteps that we made along the way!

Figure 5. Virtual interactive story map at Salishan Story Fest, August 13, 2022. Photo by Mikayla Heineck.

2.1.1 Take your time in building relationships

We learned many lessons about engaging partners within community archives projects. Perhaps most importantly, we saw the importance of setting aside plenty of time in the planning stage to build strong relationships with potential partner organizations. It was important for us to take the time to understand how they have engaged their community in similar activities, what existing collections they have, and also what resources they are willing to provide to the project. These resources may include space, introductions, facilitators or organizers of meetings, or volunteer time to review materials, document materials, or provide technical expertise.

Initial conversations with partners might not lead to immediate engagement due to timing and capacity to take on additional work. If you see potential for synergy, discuss with the partner some low-effort ways that they can stay engaged with the project, such as signing up for project updates or attending an event as an observer. At a later point, the capacity or topical focus of the activities might generate interest and your engagement might move into further discussions and a level of effort in regard to engagement. This might take the form of additional discussions on planning events, feedback on existing records, or presenting to the partner organization's members.

It is important to be flexible in presenting options for engagement to potential partner organizations and discussing specific actions they can take to be engaged that fit with their current capacity and interest. We provide some examples of what we saw in regard to our partners and their engagement at different points in the project as examples in Appendix A Partnership Engagement Priority List.

2.1.2 Make clear asks

We learned the importance of clearly articulating what we were looking for from partners, and being able to make a clear ‘ask’. Our mission was relatively direct—we wanted access to materials that would allow us to uncover silences and gaps in existing archives. However, organizations were often still uncertain about the details of what we wanted from a ‘transaction’ with them. What exactly is the cost to them, and what is the tangible benefit?

It is useful to create a two-pager that shows intended outcomes of the community archive (e.g., provide access to digital content) and a path for getting involved in that particular stream of activity (e.g., provide content, support digitization efforts, etc.). This two-page handout clarifies the ask and aligns it with the partner organization’s resources.

Another way to better leverage partners is to create an advisory board. An advisory board can help engage partners throughout the project, even when potential roles and activities shift at different stages. Offer members from partner organizations a very small stipend to meet quarterly or twice a year, to answer questions or provide guidance related to the project. The board can provide input in identifying new community stakeholders or to answer questions about classification and labels. An advisory board is even more valuable for libraries that cannot afford a staff person to push the project forward.

2.1.3 Be flexible

The most important lesson that we learned throughout this process was the importance of flexibility. Community work is often incremental and organic, meaning that it is impossible to fully plan things ahead of time. Partnerships, and not necessarily project needs, will drive engagement with the community and therefore project success.

We were constantly adding new partners; we changed the format and approach of workshops; we added new data collection approaches; etc. Keep project goals in mind at all times, and be ready to pivot approaches to achieving those goals based on work with communities.

2.1.4 You are doing more than creating an archive

Community archive projects have the potential to do much more than to create an archive. They involve your library in activities that help you to repair past harms and build new respectful relationships. These activities may also help patrons forge new relationships to the histories of the communities in which they live.

As one of our collaborators argued, “We focus too much on collections and not enough on people. Because, like, what’s the point of having a collection if people are not connecting to it?” Keep this goal in mind as you make decisions related to your project, since this perspective may lead you to make decisions that you wouldn’t make when creating a more traditional archive. This perspective, for example, led us to be open minded about what counts as an archival record, what time period those records can come from, and the degree to which records can be shared.

Our collaborators appreciated the idea of a personal archive that isn’t just about documenting highly visible historical events. Our collaborators cautioned us that these highly personal stories may not always be shareable. One of them said, “[W]e have to recognize that sometimes these stories are just highly personal, and they’re just not going to end up in the public library or community archive, at least not right away.”

Nevertheless, these private stories still play an important role in achieving the community archive’s goal. The participant continued, “[T]hat doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be coming [to community]… maybe one of the accomplishments of the archives is just getting more stories conveyed from one family member to another through generations, keeping them alive in that family, and recognize that as a success. That not every effort results in an open document that researchers or anybody else can get to. And I think that’s okay, I think that’s highly okay. It’s important.” Again, these thoughts highlight the role of community archives not only in producing and highlighting hidden stories, but in bringing together and empowering the communities for whom those stories are important.

2.1.5 Emphasize partner engagements

Our project highlighted the importance of actively engaged organizational partners. We attempted several different models for attracting participants to project workshops. The most successful model was to co-host a workshop with a partner who was willing to personally put a lot of work into getting their organization’s members to show up to the workshop. The least successful model was to co-host a workshop with a partner who only passively shared information about the workshop with their organization’s members. Hosting a public event through the library fell in between these two other models.

2.1.6 Models of Community Engagement

Phase I highlighted the many different possible models for engaging communities within an archival project. For instance, one can either choose to take a direct approach where the library is the primary organization engaging directly with the community, or an intermediary approach where the library is working with other organizations (who are directly engaging community members). When choosing the latter approach, each organization is likely working only with a specific segment of the community.

We took a hybrid approach, where at different points TPL was leading and at other points partners were leading. We recommend that libraries think about when those shifts should happen (i.e., for which activities), and which segments of the community might be best reached through an intermediary. It is particularly important to find intermediaries who can bring the library into contact with populations whose stories have been ignored or overlooked over time. When relying on partner organizations, the library must also determine what payment or sustainability models they would like to set up. The library may choose to ask organizations to volunteer time, or they may choose to pay partners and/or staff for work.

2.1.7 Networking is important

At the start of the project, CAC staff established a dedicated email address, contact form, phone number, and voicemail for the Community Archives Center. This contact information was distributed to community members at outreach events and through other channels, but has been underutilized. Even when individuals chose to sign up and provide their contact information to indicate their interest in participating in the oral history program, there was a low response rate when CAC staff followed up. Cold calls or emails to organizations have typically been unsuccessful.

By far, the most effective way to build community participation has been through networking and word of mouth. Individuals who have participated in the oral history program have connected others to CAC staff. When presentations have been delivered to organizations, members of those groups have become involved with the project.

Outreach to organizations has been much more effective when there is a relationship developed with a direct contact or when the organization learns about the project through a member or related group. This is similar to what the project team saw in Phase I, outreach and engagement was more successful when there was an internal champion within a partner organization.

2.1.8 Workshop Design

In Phase I we primarily relied on community workshops to collect story and co-design data. As described above, we chose to collapse the participatory mapping and co-design workshops together, into a single 60-minute session. After the first workshop, we agreed that the 60-minute format was not ideal—conversations often felt rushed, and we were unable to ask all of the co-design questions that we wished to ask.

Nevertheless, we did not feel that we should make the workshops longer, since we were already facing difficulties in getting participants to register for and attend them. Instead, we chose to add additional methods to the project. For instance, we set our mapping platform up so that it was able to collect new data outside of the workshops, and we set up a survey to collect co-design information. Some workshop participants shared the mapping platforms with other community members who were unable to attend. We have also brainstormed other possible approaches to data collection, such as creating a paper map display in a TPL lobby to which people can physically add stories.

Many of the core lessons learned during Phase II were similar to those discovered in Phase I and the Project Team noted how these lessons were realized across different types of project activities. These lessons were captured continuously throughout the project in the form of team reflections recorded during bi-weekly team meetings. These lessons will be particularly useful for the project toolkit, since they provide important guidance for other libraries wanting to create a community archive. Lessons learned include: the importance of networking, broad versus focused community participation, building trust with the community, and developing sustainable, equitable, and actionable partnerships.

2.1.9 Build trust with the community

Partnerships take a long time to develop and building each relationship requires creating trust over time, especially in underserved communities. In developing these relationships, community members wanted to vet the project by inquiring about intentions and goals to determine whether involvement would be positive for the particular community or organization. In planning Salishan Story Fest, local Pastor Tony Martin scheduled a meeting with CAC staff to learn more about the purpose of the event and the library’s commitment to the Eastside community.

The questions that he had included: Will the CAC be a consistent part of the community? Will this event be repeated in the neighborhood next year? What will be given to folks who attend and what will be taken from them? How will this event impact participants from the neighborhood? How will sharing their stories through our online database support participant’s voices and preserve their histories?

CAC staff learned the importance of responding to potential community concerns, the desire for sustained involvement, and the value of clearly communicating the goals and impact of the project and how they align with the community. Particularly in areas currently underserved by the library, there is a need to restore trust and services in an active and ongoing way.

2.1.10 Broad versus focused community participation

Over the course of Phase I and Phase II, the Project Team had many conversations around how to encourage broad community participation while also specifically focusing on communities within Tacoma who have been historically underrepresented in local history collections. Based on community feedback in Phase I and investigation of current collection gaps, the Team continued to pursue programs and partnerships with targeted populations and geographic areas. While this approach allows the Team to build the collection in a way that addresses archival silences, it does limit participation.

For example, Salishan Story Fest was promoted as an event specifically focused on that area. As a neighborhood currently underserved by the library, it was important for the Community Archives Center to make a clear commitment to working in this specific neighborhood. There was a good deal of attention on social media and other promotional channels in advance of the event, but this enthusiasm and support across Tacoma did not translate to broad, community-wide attendance.

CAC staff heard feedback that many people who were interested in the event were uncertain about attending if they personally were not residents or did not have connections to Salishan. While Salishan is located on the Eastside of Tacoma, even participation of Eastside residents outside of Salishan was limited.

In Phase III, the Project Team hosted a similar event in the Hilltop neighborhood. The marketing strategy for this event will still focus on Hilltop residents while making it clear that other Tacoma residents are invited to the event to learn more about the area and why it is a specific focus for the project.

2.1.11 Develop sustainable, equitable, and actionable partnerships

Following the co-design work of Phase I, CAC Staff has avoided being prescriptive about what project partnerships and community involvement would look like. The approach in organization presentations has been to provide an overview and examples of how an organization might be involved with the project but to allow the group to submit their own ideas and vision for partnership.

While making space for this type of brainstorming and co-development is important, the Project Team has found that organizations may find this approach to be too nebulous and to put too much pressure on groups that may already be spread thin. Envisioning participation in the project can be difficult to define for individuals and organizations. Similarly, the idea of community archives can be challenging to communicate.

CAC staff have adapted talking points and language over the course of Phase II to make the project’s goals more clear and to more effectively communicate the potential impact of participation.

For example, language used in presentations or meetings with potential partners has productively shifted to focus on how material collected as part of this project may be used in the future and the importance of ensuring that stories that are truly representative of Tacoma continue to be accessible. CAC staff have sought to be more clear about the intent and potential impact of the overall project and how individual and organizational participation fits into the broader scope of the project.