💡Getting Started

Why a community archive? Why focus on including historically marginalized communities?

Stories about a place, personal reflections on a changing environment/neighborhood, or recollections about how a relationship changed the path of someone’s life are all examples of potential records that could show up in a community archive in your library. These seemingly commonplace reflections from community members can bring perspectives that have been historically and intentionally blocked or not deemed worthy of inclusion in a community’s historical record. In actuality, these commonplace reflections serve to provide a fuller description of the experiences of people in a community that can serve as a foundation for future exchanges and connections as a community evolves.

Community archives can play a critical role in establishing and repairing gaps in the record of a community’s past, present, and future. This work can be done by a variety of organizations in the community and public libraries are well-equipped to play a critical role in establishing and sustaining community archives.

The Community Archives Toolkit (CAT) is a collection of lessons learned and resources that we have utilized throughout our project in building a community archive. We hope it will be useful to you as you undertake your exploration of a community archive and its role in establishing and promoting missing or marginalized voices in your community.

Who is this for? Who is our intended audience?

This toolkit is for any library staff who are interested in undertaking a community archive project in their community. We have written the toolkit with the assumption that you will not have had previous experience in building a community archive or archival experience at all.

We do hope that if you have a background in archival practice that you still find something of value in the toolkit, but its orientation is toward the reader without extensive experience in archival practice and the content is oriented towards someone with only the barest of knowledge in the archives field.

If you do have some experience in working in an archive or local history collection as part of your public library, the toolkit also contains sample forms, planning scripts, and templates that we hope will accelerate your ability to build a community archive in your community.

Where do I start?

If you are starting out without archival experience, then we recommend that you start with section 1.1 Background on Community Archives and that you then take advantage of some of the other resources we list in Appendix B Related Toolkits and Resources.

It is not possible to fit all of the knowledge that you need in a single toolkit, but we have tried our best to share collections that will help you understand how to approach this undertaking from both theoretical and practical aspects.

We would then recommend that you turn to section 1.3 Scoping Your Vision for a Community Archive to consider which model makes the most sense for your community archive.

If you have limited archival experience, we still suggest that you start with Chapter 1 What is a Community Archive? so that you understand the differences and unique role that a community archive fulfills in relation to a traditional archive or local history collection.

What do we want you to know?

While it might feel daunting getting started on your process of establishing or expanding a community archive, remember that many of the skills that you already practice in your library work are useful in building a community archive. Outreach to your community is an established activity at libraries and is obviously a core component of many of the activities related to soliciting and collecting materials for the community archive.

Similarly, forming partnerships with other organizations is a standard practice in most libraries. Our project relied upon multiple partnerships for marketing, outreach, and event participation especially for parts of the community where we didn’t have an existing or well-established relationship.

Remember: you don’t have to do everything listed in this toolkit.

We’d recommend that you start small and think about how you can leverage existing assets in the community to help to build out the community archive. Are you working with an organization on another project and realized that they have experiences and stories that would be valuable for a wider audience to know about? They could serve as a pilot, but definitely spend time discussing and planning these activities carefully to ensure that it is a positive experience for the library and the organization.

As you start the process to develop your community archive, be prepared to adapt your plans based on what you hear from community partners. You may find that your plans or ideas do not work as well or in the way that you might have expected when you started. You may take our advice or utilize a resource in the toolkit and find that it did not translate to your setting.

You might also find that this work takes longer than expected and requires tremendous effort in building relationships over time. This is not unexpected and we would assert is a common occurrence when it comes to collaboration with community-based organizations.

Lastly, we would tell you to be prepared for emotional exchanges and moments of unplanned joy. We certainly did not discuss this in our team planning meetings or when developing our grant proposal, but each of us has had moments where we have seen community bonds being formed and transformational experiences shared that have served as points of inspiration for those times when the obstacles loomed large. Appreciate and savor those moments as they are important to sustaining the work.