1. All together in solidarity:
Community Based Archiving
LACUNY Dialogues
1/23/12
Cynthia Tobar
2. What is Community Based Archiving?
• When communities take it upon themselves to
collect, organize, advocate, and provide access
to their own histories. (Amber Billey, 2011)
• Community led.
3. Why is there a need for
Community Based Archiving?
• Archives as arsenals of history, of law, arsenals
of democratic accountability
• Provides a corrective action in support of
justice by documenting under-served
communities
• Citizen archivists. Co-creating with those
affected communities ensures that there is
equal representation of the needs, interests
and perspectives of all citizens.
4. “Giving a Voice to the
Voiceless”
• “Seek opportunities to preserve
records of those often overlooked by
their collecting strategies and
recognize the broader concept of
provenance for an entire community”
(300, and 301-302)
• Consider going beyond our “custodial
role to fill in the gaps, to ensure that
documentation is created where it is
missing” (303)
• Recognize the value of “oral
transmission” by both recognizing the
“primacy of oral tradition in some
cultures,” and seeking to add to the
completeness of the archival record by
proactively creating oral histories
(303-306)
Kate Theimer, Comment on Theimer, "Chapter 6: Capturing the voices of the “voiceless populations,” pp. 298-
309," Reading "Archives Power"(blog), 2 22, 2010, http://readingarchivespower.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/capturing-
the-voices-of-the-voiceless-populations-pp-298-309/.
6. WRI Digital Oral History Project
• Running on open-source content management
software (Expression Engine)
• Images and audio files are donated by current
and former WRI leaders to archive
• Records are cataloged according to Dublin
Core metadata standards and digitally
archived according to professional archival
standards
10. What can be done to ensure archives are
including in their collections the materials
necessary to document people or organizations
who have traditionally been under-represented?
How can professional librarians and archivists
become involved?
