Event Calendar
Participatory and community archiving work empowers organizations to collaborate with communities to preserve their unique stories and histories. This approach helps ensure that collections reflect the lived experiences and perspectives of those they represent. This interactive program invites participants to an overview of participatory and community archiving. Discussion will include strategies for getting started or building on the work your organization has done, as well as opportunities to hear from practitioners in the field about community and participatory archiving at their organizations.
While conventional wisdom holds that archivists should refrain from taking subjective stances in their work, there have been increasing calls in the field to recognize that the historical record from which archives are drawn is far from neutral. How can we expect archivists to remain objective when engaging with politically fraught materials that are potentially held within institutions founded on principles that do not reflect current societal values? CCAHA Director of Preservation Services, Dyani Feige, discusses the importance of recognizing that our own positions impact the work we do in collections fields.
Ensuring we are telling an inclusive history requires us to thoroughly understand the communities we serve in order to discern what is missing and what frameworks of trust and communication must be developed. This interactive program invites participants to question and identify whose stories are missing from their collections, discern which of their contemporary communities are visible and which are invisible, and build in mechanisms to keep vulnerable communities safe while still collecting materials that tell their stories.