Community involvement key to archives relevance
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Slides for a presentation at the New Directions in Active History Conference, held in London, Ontario, October 2-4, 2015.
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Community involvement key to archives relevance
- 1. The Past on Tap Amanda Hill Hillbraith Ltd. Archives Association of Ontario Deseronto Archives
- 2. “Division of Classification and Cataloging, November 17, 1937.” U.S. National Archives’ Local Identifier: 64-NA-193 http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3874691342/
- 3. "…professional archivists need to transform themselves from elite experts behind institutional walls to becoming mentors, facilitators, coaches, who work in the community" Terry Cook, 'Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms' Archival Science, June 2013 archivalactivism.wordpress.com
- 6. "Archivists can also engage interested members of the community in interactive dialogues with mainstream archives and their holdings.“ Terry Cook, 'Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms' Archival Science, June 2013
- 7. Community involvement • Go where there are people
- 10. Try not to say ‘no’
- 11. Land that supports our feet Symposium: Blanket exercise http://www.kairoscanada.org/dignity-rights/indigenous-rights/blanket-exercise/
- 14. (Over)share obsessively • Get out-of-copyright images online with permissive licences – Let the public do your work for you, online and off – People love to share your content
- 15. Go where people are online, too • Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr – Go where people are - online as well as off • Make collections and activities as open as possible
- 16. Provides evidence of usefulness
- 17. Mobilizes support in times of trouble • Response to NADP cuts on Facebook in 2012
- 18. Tell stories!
- 19. “…if we are not helping people understand the world they live in, and if this is not what archives is all about, then I do not know what it is we are doing that is all that important.” F. Gerald Ham, 1975 ‘The Archival Edge', American Archivist, January 1975, p.13
- 20. “…that backwater, which, though apparently calm and comfortable, may also be stagnant with the signs of approaching irrelevance.” Hugh Taylor, 1993 http://www.flickr.com/photos/deserontoarchives/3699611148/
Notas del editor
- When I started out in archives, about 25 years ago, my first jobs were like this: back-room activities where contact with the public was limited. People had to make a special effort to come to a special building in order to consult with an archivist, let alone actually see records
- The archival literature over the past two decades has been clear about the need for archivists to step out from the anonymity and security of their repositories and to plant themselves firmly in the centre of contemporary life. South Africa's Verne Harris has demonstrated the fundamentally political nature of archive work and we've all come to understand that archivists' role in appraising, arranging and describing records is far from neutral and impartial. In a talk presented at the University of Dundee last year and subsequently published in Archival Science, Terry Cook phrased his own call in the following way: "…professional archivists need to transform themselves from elite experts behind institutional walls to becoming mentors, facilitators, coaches, who work in the community" This certainly resonated with me in terms of the work I've been doing for the Archives Association of Ontario. I'd like to share some of those stories of community involvement with you here and underline how important I think this is. Cook, Terry, 'Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms' Archival Science, 2012
- One of the most important things that the provincial and territorial archives councils have done is to provide support to those who are looking after their own records but who might not have any archival training or any funding to employ professional help. This group are members of the Lithuanian community in Canada who were looking to get information about their archives onto Archeion, the Ontario provincial network. We came up with a simplified RAD template for the group to use and had a day of concentrated archival description in September last year, combining their expertise on the community, its language and its records, with my arrangement and description knowledge. It was a great success.
- This photo was taken at a similar event aimed at archivists of Alcoholics Anonymous Area 83 in June 2011. These were a dedicated group of individuals who were well aware of the importance of documenting their history and who were looking for some professional guidance on how best to do that. Loss of support for the provincial councils via NADP makes this sort of activity more difficult for the councils to maintain, and yet this is just the type of work which will help to ensure the preservation of specialist community collections into the future.
- This is the second prong of Terry's proposed community involvement – on the one hand we should be helping community recordkeepers and on the other we need to be actively engaging user communities. I've been trying to do this on a small scale in my part-time job at Deseronto Archives, and wanted to share some of those stories here.
- In terms of community interactivity, the key thing is to get the archives and the archivist into as many people's consciousnesses as you can. It's important to go where there are people. This is me sweltering at the Deseronto Waterfront Festival in 2011. It was a great way to meet people who would never come into the Archives.
- This is an entry into a competition the Archives organised in 2010 on family heritage.
- I met this child's mother at a social event last year and she was keen to tell me how important this exercise had been for him in determining his identity. Initially he had been frustrated with the prospect of drawing up a family tree when he knew nothing about his biological parents. He won first prize in the competition that year and he entered it again in 2011 and won first prize that year, too. I was quite relieved that he'd left the school in 2012 so that another child could have a chance!
- My point here is that our work can be a real force for good in our communities: and you never know who you will touch and how. NEVER say no if someone suggests getting involved in something.
- Blanket exercise a way of teaching the native history that was not taught in schools
- Blanket exercise a way of teaching the native history that was not taught in schools
- Online locations such as Facebook, Flickr and Pinterest have huge audiences. You simply have to get your public domain content into them, ideally with permissive licences. People love sharing our materials – give them permission to do that and they're doing your marketing for you. This works offline as well as on – this lady is a regular user of the archives. She gets copies of our images and then takes them around town, showing them to other people. A walking outreach program!
- I believe that all archivists working in publicly-funded repositories should write online (and off) about their day-to-day work to explain what it is they do; why it matters and why it's worth paying for. It's a long way from that backroom, neutral role we once had. But if you accept that archivists are not impartial information providers, you might as well embrace your role and be explicit about it. I found this scribbled note on my desk last week. It's a reminder to myself to mention these things in a talk I gave in Dundee in April. This the way I see archival posts on blogs and Facebook. Except of course it should be 'uploading', really. This is all about demystifying our profession and opening up what we do to the public's scrutiny.
- Sharing online gives another forum for conversations with users of our material. Every year I pepper my annual report for the archives with comments taken from the Deseronto Archives blog. If I'm having a difficult day I go and read through these to cheer myself up.
- I wrote a blog post about the NADP cuts when they happened last year and it sparked off an interesting discussion on the Archives' Facebook page. This was a chance for me to explain what was going on, and why it was important.
- I always come back to this quotation. We can’t be helping people understand the past and the present if we look ourselves and our records away in backrooms.
- A RELIABLE, ESSENTIAL AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, UTTERLY NOTICEABLE AND OUTSTANDING part of whichever communities we serve.