Throughout our project, collaborators emphasized that community engagement needed to extend beyond the initial design of the archive, and into all core archival functions including acquisition and appraisal of materials, the creation of arrangement and description processes, and the development of reference and access policies. Otherwise, community archives risk advancing new forms of marginalization in your community. As one collaborator argued, when done incorrectly community archive projects
“literally physically store and classify things [in ways that] can actually colonize the materials, or for something that is from an oral tradition into a less accessible modality of like a physical object.”
One of our collaborators spoke about this in relation to the racial dynamics of archives. They worried about how, all too often, archives produce an
“uncomfortable dynamic, where stories and lived experiences and material artifacts are taken from communities of color and then, like, they really go into maybe public archives, but archives that are curated by white people. And then they feel less accessible, but they also, it’s like a very transactional thing.”
In contrast, when done correctly community archive projects can greatly advance the ethical stewardship of archival materials. These projects may act as a
“sort of catalyst for communities who haven’t started this work of preserving and archiving their histories, to be a catalyst for them to realize that their history is important and to see themselves in, you know, the center.”
This has the potential to remake the extractive history of archiving by encouraging historians and activists, from the communities being represented in the archive, to be more involved in the processes shaping the archive. Our collaborators encouraged us to get out into the community as much as possible throughout our project, and to include community members in everything from classification processes to policy decisions.
This, of course, forces community archive projects to grapple with difficult questions about who should hold particular histories, how materials should be held and shared, whether reparative work needs to be done before collecting materials, and much more. Answering these questions requires libraries to develop robust yet flexible strategies and policies regarding their community archive.
In this section we describe some of the inspiration that we drew upon for our work, and then share specific policies and processes that we developed and adopted. We hope that these examples provide a good starting point for your own work, but we also emphasize that your policies and processes should be developed in collaboration with your own community partners.
2.7.1 FAIR, CARE, & the post-custodial model of materials collection
A post-custodial approach to collecting can help to address some of the concerns about extraction and exploitation. Participants also considered, for instance, the importance of using languages that are comfortable for those giving oral histories, and the possible role of new technologies (e.g., cell phones with high resolution cameras) in democratizing the creation of archival records.”
It can also be helpful to look beyond archival discussions for inspiration on how to address concerns about exploitation. One possible source of ideas, for example, relates to ongoing discussions about open data and data sovereignty. There has been a strong movement, particularly in the science community, toward the open sharing of data.
This is exemplified by the FAIR Principles, which were created in 2016 to provide guidelines related to the management and stewardship of open scientific data (Wilkinson, Dumontier, Aalbersberg, et al., 2016). FAIR stands for Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse. It stipulates that data should be easy to find, should be easy to access once it is found, should be easy to combine with other data, and should be well described so that they are easy to re-use in different contexts.
While open data sharing is fantastic in many contexts, it is sometimes incompatible with the goals of some groups that have been historically marginalized or exploited by the scientific community. Indigenous groups, for example, have historically had their knowledge stolen from them by scientific communities, and there are movements to support Indigenous communities to take greater control of their data—often described as data sovereignty.
The CARE Principles were created as a supplement to FAIR, to ensure that movements toward open data also consider the needs of Indigenous peoples. CARE stands for Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics. While this does not speak directly to archives, it nonetheless can provide inspiration around how open sharing can be adjusted to ensure that the individuals and communities contributing to your archives can be protected.
2.7.2 Access restriction policies
Here are a few examples of different and custom approaches to access restriction policies that we developed in respect to each community within our service areas:
For the Tacoma Community House, we provide access to descriptions of their records, but their records live up the street with them.
Why are these policies important? Community archives can adopt and consider indigenous knowledge practices, particularly asking “Does information really want to be free?”. Kimberley Christen (2012), in collaboration with the Warumungu Aboriginal community, has explored and developed the Mukurtu CMS which is a “community driven software that addresses the ethical curation of, and access to, cultural heritage” (Christen, Merrill, and Wynne, 2017).
This includes “cultural protocol driven metadata fields, differential user access based on cultural and social relationships, and functionality to include layered narratives at the item level” (Christen, et al., 2017). This critical approach to develop and maintain access restriction policies, moves pass of the binary of “open or closed, free or proprietary, public or private” (2012:2874) and consider respects to “cultural knowledge [as] conferred and transferred based on systems of obligation and reciprocity” (2012:2875)—information in social and moral terms, instead of purely economic—as practiced in indigenous communities. We carry these practices into all community partnerships.
2.7.3 Release forms
We created a number of different types of release forms—oral histories, student work (with parental permission), and group release forms where we ask for group consent, which allowed for efficient gathering of permissions. See Appendix D for sample templates of the release forms we used.
2.7.4 Deed of Gift & copyright
We use the existing Deed of Gift for the Northwest Room (see Appendix D). While the TPL Deed of Gift might not be the best example at this moment in time, here are other examples from other existing community archival efforts:
In the case of future and long term access, use, and reuse, questions about copyrights can be discussed and established within the Deed of Gift. CAC inherited the policies already established in the Northwest Room infrastructure. Check in with your library’s existing systems to avoid reinventing the wheel.
