To me a lot of confusion regarding the term community archives comes down to different ideas about purpose. While often the purpose of a community archives to document the memory of a community (regardless of what that community is), others may not always see it this way.
Take a rugby club archives for example. While the volunteers and the main users of the archives would see its purpose as documenting the memories of people and events relating to the club, other institutions can see it as the “ABC rugby club archives”, or as a “sports archive”.
This is a small but important distinction because what happens is that the focus changes from the purpose of the archive (to maintain individual and collective memory about a shared interest) to the thing that individual and collective memory is based around (rugby).
This change of focus can result in variations in people's understanding on how community archives are perceived and the archival practices within them applied. A good example of the latter is archival description.
Now I am a bit of an archival purist, but no matter how much I love my provenance and original order, I can see that many of the established guidelines for description don’t truly address user need, and this seems to be particularly evident in a community archives. In my local archives for example, while I dwell on how to describe different agencies and user groups, users prefer to ask for items along the following lines:
" How do I find information on an individual/ organisation / group important to me that was involved in an associated event that was also sort of important, set within some (general) location that I know about, and happening within some (very vague) time-frame?".
The fact is, (and perhaps this provides another example of the unique aspects of community archives) is that users of community archives are often already familiar with the context. Therefore, they don't just need the standard finding aids telling them what they already know. They also need ways of finding the bits they don't.
So while provenance and original order-based arrangement and description is vital in any community archives, community archives also places that can force us to think outside the square when it comes to addressing the needs of the user community and what they want in terms of maintaining and accessing their community memory.
Comments
Hi Sarah,
I am currently studying my Masters of Information Technology at QUT Library Major. I am a Library Technician and as a project I am setting up my school Archives. I am interested in writing a Literature review on collaboration of school archives between local schools in the community. The benefits to schools in sharing their archives and the benefits to the community in general in learning about individual schools and how they came to be. Could you give me some advice on what would be a good start? Please feel free to email me kathy.hopson@gccc.qld.edu.au
Cheers.
Kathy Hopson
I would also draw particular attention to how embeded community archives are within their respective communities, many see themselves are part of the community that they document and collect in a way that few institutional archives do. So that while some archival collections may receive higher level of preservation, or would perhaps be more efficiently processed at a larger institution, these institutions do not have the extensive knowledge that community members themselves possess - enabling a level of descriptive and contextual insight into material that few institutions can muster. Though having worked across both institutional and community archives, there are often much longer backlogs and lower level processing being undertaken in institutional archives.
Good to hear from you Linda!
Great post, thanks Sarah.
Work I did last year with a local environmental organisation also highlighted the issue of how current records can get 'into the Archive' and what that means the memory, identity and organisational processes such as compliance.
In this situation it was useful to think about what to identify as archival even before it was created. I also set up a system whereby organisational records where not 'classified', but were aligned to how the members saw their work. There was no transition from current record to archive, as information was being 'born archival' and that which was already identified as not having continuing value was able to be deleted or destroyed when required.
It is this kind of support and professional guidance that I hope to bring to community organisations. The needs of the user community is so vital to understand and apply to design and implementation of the kind of recordkeeping system that I refer to.
Would be great to hear more about your work!! Are you going to the ASA Conference this year?