The Arboretum

Community Archiving

4 min read

Community Archiving

The practice of communities keeping their own records — because who does the keeping determines who gets remembered, and institutions do not remember the same things communities do.

The Practice

Every community has a memory. Most of it is informal: the story about how the block association formed after the flood, the recipe that came over from a grandmother who didn’t write things down, the argument that split a congregation in 1972. The question is what happens to that memory. It can stay oral, cycling through the people who were there until the last of them dies. It can get captured by an outside institution — a university archive, a newspaper morgue, a government records office — in a form shaped by the institution’s categories. Or the community can keep it itself.

Community archiving is the third option. The practices vary widely: parish registers and congregational records; neighborhood oral history projects with donated recordings; born-digital archives of social media posts from a civil rights protest; boxes of photographs organized by volunteers in a church basement. What unifies them is that the community is the keeper, not a third party.

What It Teaches

Who does the keeping changes what gets kept. The South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), founded in 2008, exists because South Asian American history was systematically missing from institutional collections. In under two decades it has assembled over 6,000 digitized items — letters, photographs, oral histories, newspapers — that no university archive had thought to collect. The post-custodial approach SAADA developed lets original documents stay with their owners while digital copies become freely accessible: the archive doesn’t need to possess the thing in order to remember it.

Oral history is not a lesser form. StoryCorps, founded in 2003, has recorded interviews with more than 700,000 participants — forty-minute conversations between two people who know each other, guided by trained facilitators. A copy of each interview goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The model draws on the Works Progress Administration’s 1930s oral history work and the tradition of Studs Terkel. What those interviews capture is not the official record but the granular one: what it felt like, what was lost, what was held onto. Archives of feeling, as much as fact.

Digital activism requires its own archivists. Documenting the Now emerged from a specific problem: social media posts from Ferguson in 2014 were disappearing, either deleted or platform-deplatformed, just as researchers and community members most needed them. The project developed tools for collecting and preserving social media archives with community consent, centering the ethical questions (who gets to decide what’s preserved?) alongside the technical ones.

Church and parish records did this for centuries before anyone called it community archiving. The registers of births, deaths, marriages, and memberships kept by congregations are community memory in its oldest institutional form. They survive when civil records don’t, especially for communities who weren’t always legible to the state — the enslaved, the immigrant, the non-citizen. The genealogical significance of these records is well known; less often noted is the governance function they served: proof of membership, of kinship, of who was owed what.

The Tension

Community archives can gatekeep in their own ways. Decisions about what’s worth keeping, who has access, how materials are described — these are all power decisions, even when they’re made by the community itself. An archive controlled by the founding generation may not serve the second generation; an archive organized around one ethnic or religious identity may erase the people inside the community who didn’t fit those categories.

Institutions have resources that community archives often lack: professional staff, stable funding, climate-controlled storage, legal and technical expertise. The choice between community control and institutional resources isn’t always available in its pure form. Many community archives eventually transfer materials to universities or state archives to ensure survival, and in doing so accept the institution’s frame. Whether the gain in durability is worth the loss of control is a question every archive eventually has to answer.

Connections

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