3.1 Overview of Collection Building Approach

Once you have a general plan set up for implementing your community archive, it is time to start collecting materials! In this chapter we first provide a general overview of the collection building approach that we used, so that you have a general understanding of what you will need to accomplish. We then describe specific activities that we used to collect materials from organizations and individuals.

Our hope is that you will be able to choose some of these activities and adapt them for your own community. The third section then takes a deep dive into describing one of our community events, the Salishan Story Fest.

Our goal in this section is to show you how we brought a bunch of activities together to carry out a cohesive public event that helped us to collect a lot of materials from one segment of our community.

Finally, we conclude the chapter with some more tips and tricks that we learned throughout the process of collecting materials.

Figure 9. 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).

This is an overview of considerations to make when building collections, the practice of collecting materials. First, consider expanding access to materials that already exist within archives in your community, and second, consider collecting materials that do not yet exist within an archive. These two sets of activities will require different approaches and levels of effort.

1. When expanding access to existing archival artifacts to your community, we surveyed the diversity of access needs of different media types, as well as the material and social acts of community outreach. Consider access (i.e., searchability, discoverability, and usability) of media types such as printed photographs, digital images, periodicals, papers, and agreements/contracts. To avoid the fallacy of “if you build it they will come”, we emphasized the practices of community outreach. This includes increasing awareness, promoting community-first contributions, being present at existing and new community events, and engaging in 1:1 material collection and interviews.

2. When collecting materials not yet included in an archive, collect with individuals and collect with organizations. This includes but is not limited to oral history interviews, gallery walks, presentations, story mapping, co-design workshops, digitization, and youth activities. Each of these activities are described in more detail below.

Figure 10. The oral history recording station at Hilltop Story Fest, May 6, 2023. Photo by Mikayla Heineck.