Constructing Digital Commons
Constructing the Digital Commons
Annotations by Lee Allen
Project Definition
The focus of this project is how community archives preserve digital content, focusing particularly on determining the pros and cons of their working with other groups or institutions for large-scale preservation. The surveyed articles present several possibilities for community archives working with others, and these range from partnering with university archives to public libraries and data activists. These articles were seleccted because they provided examples of community archives independently managing digital resources (such as Cocciolo, Allard, and Ferris’ papers) and archives that collaborated with another institution (such as Copeland and Erde’s papers). This bibliography examines how community archives handle the problems associated with preserving digital collections and making them accessible.
Annotations
Allard, D., & Ferris, S. (2015). Antiviolence and marginalized communities: Knowledge creation, community mobilization, and social justice through a participatory archiving approach. Library Trends, 64(2), 260-383.
This article is an overview of the Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project authored by the creators of the project. The project is split into three collections: the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database, the Sex Work Database, and the Post-Apology Residential School Database. The authors collected a variety of digital and print materials, since they were motivated by the large amounts of ephemeral digital materials disappearing between 2002 and 2006 due to organizational shifts. Their literature review focuses on the intersection of archives, social justice, and the digital sphere. Their methodology is founded in community-led participatory archiving. The unique axes of oppression that indigenous people and sex workers face means that the authors have grappled with issues such as biases in controlled vocabularies, protecting? the privacy and dignity of sex workers, balancing negative mainstream portrayals of indigenous women, and the intellectual and cultural property rights of indigenous peoples. While these issues were always present in physical archives, the ease of access that digital archives offer make them even more pressing. The authors conclude by arguing that for a community archive to succeed, the community should be equal stakeholders and the archive should actively weave in anti-colonialist, feminist, and indigenous thought even when it might contradict “proper” traditional archival practice.
Atiso, K., & Freeland, C. (2016). Identifying the social and technical barriers affecting engagement in online community archives: A preliminary study of “Documenting Ferguson” archive. Library Philosophy and Practice, Paper 1377, 1-21.
This article focuses on the barriers faced by contributors to the Documenting Ferguson archive, which was created to document digital objects that were created in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder. The first focus is on social barriers preventing people from contributing, which found that out of the 13 contributors that responded, most were motivated by altruism. The second focus is on technical barriers, which found that the data contribution system was often opaque and lacked any comprehensive help documentation. They conclude that greater public awareness, increased transparency and trust, and a more refined website design would encourage greater contribution to the archive. This article is useful because it highlights some of the flaws of both community archives and digital repositories. By outlining a specific case study, it shows that community archives aren’t always well situated to take advantage of digital repositories. Beel, D. E., Wallace, C. D., Webster, G., Nguyen, H., Tait, E., Macleod, M., & Mellish, C. (2017). Cultural resilience: The production of rural community heritage, digital archives and the role of volunteers. Journal of Rural Studies, 54, 459–468. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.05.002 Beel et al. discuss the digital community archives alongside the concept of community resilience, a field of study that examines the ability of communities to react and adapt to negative forces. In this framework, Beel et al. characterize digital archives as a product of that resilience Their use of digital methodologies allow the community to preserve knowledge in a durable way and to reconnect with the diaspora across the physical divide separating them. By invoking the concept of cultural resilience, this paper provides insight into how archives are used to maintain community amidst changes, particularly across geographical space.
Caswell, M., & Mallick, S. (2014). Collecting the easily missed stories: Digital participatory microhistory and the South Asian American Digital Archive. Archives and Manuscripts, 42(1), 73–86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.880931
Caswell and Mallick present an analysis of the South Asian American Digital Archive’s First Days Project, a project designed to capture short, candid histories from South Asian immigrants. They argue that this project, and others like it, allow archives to actively fill themselves with records from underrepresented groups instead of relying on historically racist collection practices. By actively requesting these records and making them available digitally, they can document the stories and emotions that are often lost in conventional archives. This paper shows a wildly successful example of a digital community archive, since the project has both successfully created a glut of records and captured mainstream attention from popular media outlets like Public Radio International. While not every community archive benefits from wider attention, in this case, it shows that the monumental task of outreach is achievable.
Cocciolo, A. (2017). Community Archives in the Digital Era: A case from the LGBT community. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (PDT&C), 45(4), 157-165. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2016-0018
Cocciolo’s article is essentially a case study of his work helping Front Runners New York, an LBGT running club, digitize physical records and manage their born-digital records. This excellent case study digs into some of the specific problems faced when building a digital archive, such as the club removing images from old digital newsletters due to storage limitations. By providing concrete examples and thoroughly explaining their process, this paper offers a good overview of the potential hurdles that community archives face when constructing a digital repository.
Copeland, A. (2015). Public Library: A place for the digital community archive. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (PDT&C), 44(1), 12-21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2015-0004
While most research in this area tends to discuss creating a separate digital repository for community archives, Copeland suggests creating a digital repository for born-digital items at public libraries. The challenges she faced included the rapidly shrinking budgets of public libraries and difficulties with adopting new technology, but she mentions free resources offered by groups such as the Digital Curation Center and Cornell University. Since most of the articles on this topic suggest using non-governmental community groups as managers of the archive, having public libraries store born-digital records is a novel idea. While I have some reservations about using a governmental organization that is not funded directly by the community, if the funding issues are solved it would create a much more stable archive than most community archives.
Erde, J. (2014). Constructing archives of the Occupy movement. Archives and Records, 35(2), 77–92. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2014.943168
Erde’s article documents the cautious interaction between two Occupy movements (Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Philadelphia) and mainstream archives. While the Occupy archivists were wary about cooperating with organizations such as NYU’s Taimiment library due to concerns over access and NYU’s refusal to acknowledge their graduate student union, the lack of resources available led them to enter limited cooperation with NYU. Erde argues that while mainstream institutions have more resources and expertise, the Occupy movement shows that in an age of increasing digital content and limited archival budgets, the wider community should be brought in to help manage collections. This article is useful because it shows that the archival knowledge is a two-way street: instead of simply ingesting knowledge from the mainstream archival institution, community archives can teach mainstream archives on effective content management in an increasingly digital world. Morgan E. C. & Paris, B. S. (2018). Back-ups for the future: Archival practices for data activism. Archives and Manuscripts, 46(2), 124-142, DOI: 10.1080/01576895.2018.1468273
Currie and Paris, in this article, show that the separate trends of data activism and archival activism share many of the same concerns and methods. Their main argument is that both practices are political, independent from mainstream cultural institutions, seek to fill a gap in representation, and legitimize objects that would otherwise be scattered or seen as anecdotal. While I’ve done previous research into community archives, I wasn’t aware of data activism until I read this paper. The examples provided, which include citizens testing air quality, counting bikes and pedestrians, and measuring water inflows into a canal, demonstrated that the realm of digital archiving often overlaps with other fields that it can learn from.
Ormond-Parker, L., & Sloggett, R. (2012). Local archives and community collecting in the digital age. Archival Science, 12(2), 191-212.
The article covers the complicated relationship that Aboriginal peoples in Australia have with conventional archives, and the community-led digital archives that have started to appear, such as the Ara Irititja Project and the Mulka project. These archives often defy Western standards of access and use; the Ara Irititja Project has two separate archives for men’s and women’s business, and the Mulka project produces DVDs and CDs for community members that don’t have access to the internet. By storing historical and contemporary digital records in community-controlled archives, the community itself can determine what to preserve and how to preserve it, rather than relying on conventional archives. The author’s frank discussion of the benefits and hazards, while not universally applicable, can be generalized to other community archives run by marginalized peoples, which gives me more insight into the long-term pitfalls community digital archives may fall into.
Poole, A. H. (2020), The information work of community archives: A systematic literature review. Journal of Documentation, 76(3), 657-687.
Poole’s ambitious article is essentially a record of the last 40 years of research into community archives, especially their relationship with digital archives. He starts by compiling a literature review on community archives and discusses some of the inherent difficulties with defining a “community archive”, since both communities and archives often have nebulous and shifting boundaries. The next section tackles the changes in practices and methods that separate community archives from conventional archives, which include a greater amount of enthusiastic stakeholders, a willingness to use alternative archival principles, and the often inherently political and liberatory values that the community archives embrace. Poole also weighs the difficulties that community archives face, which include a lack of long-term sustainability, scant financial and human resources, and intracommunity tension. Poole concludes with several exciting avenues for research, including studying intracommunity conflict and questioning the political nature of community archives. The importance of this article to my research cannot be overstated: by providing both a literature review and proposing further research questions, this paper has given me both a preponderance of journal articles and possible thesis statements. Notably, most of my previous research focused on community archives in the US and UK, while Poole cites community archives in Nigeria, Australia, Bosnia, Northern India, and indigenous/aboriginal nations in Australia and North America.
