Working from behind the Scenes: The Appalachian Student Health Coalition Archive Project

The Appalachian Student Health Coalition Archive Project reflects in its process the very philosophies which guided the Coalition in its practice of community organizing 50 years ago, and serves as an emblematic response to a core question of community-driven archives: how ought the relationship dynamic between collecting institutions and local communities operate? What is most crucial to the effective kindling of community power and independence? What is our responsibility as archivists?

Our CommunityDriven Archives project supports historically underrepresented history keepers in telling, sharing, and preserving their storiesSince 2017staff and graduate research assistants from UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library have worked closely in partnership with four organizations connected to historically marginalized communities in the American South: The Appalachian Student Health Coalition (ASHC), the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA), the Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project (EKAAMP), and the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum (SAAACAM). Each partnership has its own specific set of desired outcomes, but the goal is to address existing silences within the historical record. We believe that the fabric of what gets remembered (and why) is best woven by a diverse and engaged set of community storytellersit should not be the exclusive domain of those in power. The work of the Community-Driven Archives Team (CDAT) is built upon this understanding and guided by the principles of community leadership, ownership, and stewardship 

Our Partnership with the ASHC

With this framework in mind, I’ll speak more specifically to my experience as a graduate research assistant with the Appalachian Student Health Coalition—a student organization founded at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in the 1960s. Participating students provided healthcare to rural Appalachian communities across Tennessee and on the southern edges of Virginia and Kentucky. Their work was often at the intersection of healthcare and environmental and racial justice, and the ASHC pioneered a new approach to community organizing and student activism.

A page from ASHC participant Deborah Cogswell's 1971 scrapbook documents her experience in several Appalachian communities. Pictured here are snapshots from the Briceville, TN health fair, Cogswell's host family (Willie and May Spears), and other outings with friends and local community members. The page features nine square polaroids, each with handwritten descriptive text underneath.
A page from ASHC participant Deborah Cogswell’s 1971 scrapbook documenting her experience in several Appalachian communities. Pictured here are snapshots from the Briceville, TN health fair, Cogswell’s host family (Willie and May Spears), and other outings with friends and local community members.

Our partnership with the ASHC began in 2013, predating the 2017 Community-Driven Archives Mellon grant. At that time, the focus of the work was primarily centered around conducting oral histories with ASHC partners and alumni, as well as developing a more active ASHC alumni network and project advisory group. Together, the ASHC and Community-Driven Archives staff decided to build a website as the means by which to share the ASHC story (through maps, timelines, and archival material documenting its philosophy and work) 

The Appalachian Student Health Coalition’s new website homepage features the project’s three most prominent themes: Reinventing Primary Healthcare in Appalachia and the Rural South, Organizing for Community Power and Environmental Justice, and Expanding the Boundaries of Higher Education and Professional Practice. Each of the themes is displayed as a box with corresponding photographs on the top half and white text amidst a deep orange backdrop on the bottom. They are centered side-by-side across the screen.
A screenshot of the ASHC’s website homepage highlighting three of its most prominent themes.
An article from the local newspaper details what to expect from the approaching ‘Health Fair’ in Grundy County. Local residents are asked to host ASHC staff in return for free diagnostic medical services, set to begin at James K. Shook School in Tracy City from June 24th-30th. It’s also explained that these examinations will be performed by Vanderbilt medical and nursing students under physician supervision. The article headline “Summer ‘Health Fair’ in Grundy” is positioned at the top of the digital scan, followed by text (no pictures). An unrelated second article entitled “Tyson Said Reopening Here” is in view at the bottom.
A periodical announcement of the ASHC health fair to be held in Tracy City, TN.

I joined the initiative just last year in the late Spring of 2020. Since then, I’ve been most involved in management of the ASHC’s oral history index. Together, CDAT staff and former Coalition participants developed a system to collaboratively review these stories so that together we could decide upon their most relevant tags, categories, and themes—pulling out important names, places, and other related information. Some examples include stories which cover particular events in the Coalition’s history, such as the logistics of their health fairs and development of community health councils. Others discuss the intersection of healthcare and race or the politics of healthcare. This review process also involves collectively choosing vignettes from longer clips to feature on the website. These are shortened stories from within a larger narrative that highlight something special about the ASHC or its participants–for example, the Coalition’s foundational philosophies or the cultural encounters experienced by many students while living in Appalachia. It’s our shared goal that these audiovisual interviews and the rich content found within will be discoverable and of service to researchers 

Four recently captured vignettes are featured on the ASHC website’s homepage under “Recently Added Stories”. Each blurb is vertically oriented and features an image, the story title, and a 30-50 word preview of the story’s descriptive content. Included in this screenshot are Dal Macon’s commentary on “The focal role of listening in community organizing”, “Dal Macon’s introduction to Bill Dow and the Student Health Coalition”, “Margaret Ecker on her inspiration to pursue nursing”, and Barbara Clinton’s commentary on “‘Freedom from drain’ and the Maternal-Infant Health Outreach Worker Project (MIHOW)”.
A screenshot of the most recently captured vignettes posted to the ASHC website.

Reflections on Partnership

As the grant comes to a close, project priorities have somewhat shifted. Priorities are now largely concerned with game-planning for the future of the project—raising funds in support of the project’s long-term goals, roadmapping important next steps toward independence from a UNC Libraries staff leadership role, and training select ASHC alumni (known as Websters) in website and content management via WordPress. Essentially, our focus at this stage is on the movement from dependency to independence and supporting ASHC leadership and skills development in the interest of project sustainability.   

Over the course of my involvement, I’ve thought much about the relationship between UNC Libraries project staff/archivists and the ASHC. What is our institutional role so that community storytellers and their needs are centered? How do we effectively support them without commandeering the products and process? Is there even an appropriate space for said relationship with and support from institutions in community-driven work? 

On that last point, I say yes, most definitely. But navigating it well takes patience, humility, adaptability, a learner’s and listener’s mindset, and perseverance through its challenges. Most importantly, it takes trust. And trust takes time.  

As I’ve been reflecting on this more in the last few weeks, I’ve found inspiration in the fact that what we’re doing as partners with the ASHC, the ASHC similarly undertook as activists in rural Appalachian communities. They leveled themselves. They listened first. They were eager to learn from and respond to community needs. The ASHC embodied a philosophy of service rather than radical self-righteousness. As their project partner 50 years later, we can learn from their example of what it means to take a step back. To work from behind the scenes, elevate others, and help facilitate a community’s storytelling.  

Dr. Pete Moss, chief resident in Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University, consults with a nursing student and nun at the Clairfield Health Fair.
Dr. Pete Moss consulting with a nursing student and a nun at the Clairfield Health Fair. At the time he was chief resident in Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Community-Driven Archives grant and its other collaborations, please visit the Southern Historical Collection’s webpage here. We also encourage you to check out the ASHC’s recently updated website at studenthealthcoalition.org. Take a step back into the 1960s and 70s as you indulge in the spirit of student activism and learn through personal accounts what it means to effectively and sustainably be part of community organizing.  

Stories from Swift Memorial Institute: A Late-HBCU in Appalachia

I was lucky enough to join the Archival Seedlings program through UNC Libraries’ Community-Driven Archives project with the idea of assisting residents in Bristol, twin cities that span across Tennessee and Virginia, with organizing and making available some of the narratives they wanted to share with their communities and the broader world. Their stories include the history of Blackbottom, the urban-removed Black business district, and the Historic Lee Street Baptist Church that survived relocation.

Through months of conversations and technical support from UNC staff and local elders, we were able to identify project goals and methods for achieving a helpful and sustainable outcome. Unfortunately, the phrase, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” came true with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and public health crisis. For this project, the rapid spread of the virus meant I could not engage with elders in Bristol who were leading the narrative development because face-to-face conversations would certainly place those leaders in danger.

Black and white postcard featuring a three-story building with many windows and a central tower, labeled "Swift College"
Swift College, ca. 1920. Courtesy the Swift Museum

With the assistance of UNC staff through several brainstorming calls, we were able to identify a project closer to home that could be implemented with minimal contact with residents. In 2012 and 2013, I had helped conduct oral history interviews with a number of community members associated with Swift Memorial Institute, a late Historically Black College in Rogersville, Tennessee. Additionally, I had access to more formal interviews with scholars and authors on that subject matter. My project then became curating these raw interviews into something that would be useful to Swift alumni, the community, and researchers interested in their stories.

Swift Memorial Institute

In 1883, Swift College was established by the Presbyterian church as a place of learning for formerly enslaved African Americans and their children. Swift’s sister school, Maryville College, enrolled African American students alongside white students until 1901, when the State of Tennesse passed a law barring private schools from hosting integrated classes. Maryville sent its African American students along with $25,000 of its own endowment to Swift, changing its name to Swift Memorial Institute and fortifying efforts to construct new buildings and expand its curriculum. Swift also served the region’s high school students.

Shortly after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Swift closed its doors and, in 1955, its administrative building was torn down. The remaining buildings and campus grounds now host the local Hawkins County School System’s offices and maintenance department. Throughout its 72 year history, Swift Memorial Institute has been a beacon for African American communities, offering a standard for African American education and institution building.

An African-American woman-presenting person seated in front of a sign reading "Swift Memorial Jr. College 2004 Reunion 25th Anniversary"
Stella Gudger, Founder of Swift Museum, Rogersville, TN. Courtesy William Isom, II

One of the feeder schools to the college was Price Public, a primary school located adjacent to the Swift campus. For nearly 20 years, my cousin, Stella Gudger, coordinated the preservation and restoration of this last remaining Black school in the town of Rogersville. Through her efforts and support from the community, the building now operates as Price Public Community Center & Swift Museum. In 2012, I was approached by Cousin Stella to help conduct oral histories with Swift alumni and researchers with information on the early history of the college. That work provided the content for a short documentary on the school and the large amount of stories about Swift associated with my Community-Driven Archives project.

The stories I compiled and made accessible through this Community-Driven Archives project were personally important as a mechanism for repairing some of the invisibility of Black narratives of Hawkins County, Tennessee in dominant local narratives. My own long familial history with the immediate area has propelled my interest in finding creative ways to put these narratives in front of those with roots in the area and to interject this history into the broader historical considerations of the region. By doing this work, I also came to a good understanding of the continued importance of Swift College to those who attended the school—the value the immediate community places on the HBCU’s history and the pride associated with being a “Swiftie.” With the removal of Swift’s main administrative building, elders are relying on their stories and the efforts of the Swift Museum as stewards of this special space and its lessons for future generations.

Project Support through Archival Seedlings

Entrance to a building with a sign reading "Price Public Community Center & Swift Musuem" with a fence in front draped with a sign reading "Swift Reunion, 2015, Rogersville, TN"
Price Public Community Center & Swift Museum. Courtesy William Isom, II

Through the support of UNC Libraries’ Community-Driven Archives program, I was able to convert a collection of older video files from .avi to .mp4, edit them down for content, and upload 28 oral histories and interviews to YouTube. Project contributor Amira Sakalla then worked to transcribe the nearly six hours of interview content, made possible through Archival Seedlings program funding. Coming out of this project, we were able to deliver these videos to the Price Public Community Center & Swift Museum in their preferred format, DVDs, and supply printed transcriptions neatly bound for reading. To ensure redundancy and public availability, we’re also making the interviews and transcripts available to the Hawkins County Archives and the East Tennessee Historical Society in Knoxville. For researchers based outside of the area, all materials are accessible through a dedicated webpage through the Black in Appalachia project, along with other Black history materials associated with Rogersville and Hawkins County.

An African-American woman-presenting person wearing purple and gold, Swift Memoral Institute colors, seated in front of purple and gold graduation robes and backdrop
Swift Alumn Dessa Parkey-Blair. Courtesy William Isom, II

Throughout this project and the obstacles presented by the global pandemic, I’ve learned the value of being nimble with my big ideas and plans. It has also been a healthy reminder of the importance of moving narratives off of the hard drive and into the streets, so to speak, mindful of the steady passing of elders who contributed to this body of work. In a tiny way, this project is dedicated to the late Dessa Parkey-Blair, a lifelong educator from the hills of Hancock County, Tennessee who said, “All you got to do is sit tight, listen, learn all you can, do all you can, say all you can, but be right. That’s how I do life.”

For more about the Archival Seedlings initiative on the Southern Sources blog:

Archival Seedlings: Resourcing Local Collaborators Across the American South

Community-based, in a Digital Space

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter: @SoHistColl_1930  #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

Community-based, in a Digital Space

In January 2020, Archival Seedlings emerged as the final initiative of the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) Grant. We connected with ten individual history keepers across the South, partnering with them to provide support for their historical projects and archival collections. This included support with digital tools, project planning, and other archival skills. By doing this work, we sought to create a broad network connecting a cohort of local history-keepers to archives professionals, institutions, non-profit leaders and, most of all, to one another.

While our grant has a finite ending, the work of our community partners does not. As an institution, we are curious about what programs and content have been most helpful to independent archives and history keepers. One such program, the Archival Seedlings initiative has provided a unique opportunity for archives professionals and individual history keepers to learn from one another in an effort to think about and create sustainable frameworks for archives.

Prior to 2020, our grant team’s initiatives set a huge precedent for travel. Our team visited many of our pilot partners several times a year, and some partners came to visit us here at UNC. Therefore, we planned for Archival Seedlings to uphold grant tradition and invited Seedlings to gather for a workshop covering all things archives set for July 2020 at the Wilson Special Collections Library.

This workshop would be a time where CDA staff and Seedlings would finally work alongside and get to know one another face-to-face.  Seedlings are based in Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Based on our physical distance, 80 percent of the program was already designed to take place via phone calls, Zoom webinars, and email. As a result, we had considered the July workshop at UNC a much-anticipated reward for everyone’s patience after navigating six months of long-distance communication and technological learning curves.

But by the end of March of this year, our grant team knew that we had to move the in-person Archival Seedlings event online due to safety needs presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The change of medium from in-person to digital presented an unexpected opportunity to stretch our expectations of technology and start rethinking how we can use it to create embodied and relational experiences online.

How did we do this?

We asked several of our library colleagues to lead web-based workshops on topics of exhibits, digitization, ethics, and research methods. Facilitators planned their workshops as online sessions in a combination of prerecorded videos and live sessions via Zoom. For example, in place of a two-hour in-person workshop, Wilson Special Collections Library Exhibit Coordinator Rachel Reynolds recorded two short videos about the storytelling and design elements of exhibits and then held a Live Q&A session with Seedlings to answer questions and address specific elements of their projects. Sessions such as this enabled Seedlings to encounter online content at their own pace. They created a participatory space, albeit a digital one, for Seedlings to share their projects and experiences with one another along with CDA and Wilson Library staff.

Pivoting from in-person to online: The nuts and bolts

As we reconfigured our workshop due to the social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 crisis, we decided to take advantage of the flexibility of technology to create a hybrid (i.e. both synchronous and asynchronous) event. In order to get a snapshot of Seedlings’ online preferences and availability, we sent out a survey that asked for their preferred days of the week, time of day, and “Zoom tolerance” to help us determine the ideal session length. Responses were all over the map except for a unanimous preference to keep Zoom sessions between 45 minutes to 1 hour long.

Our shift to an online program necessitated hybrid content sessions and longer stretches of time for Seedlings to encounter and digest curated digital content. Out of this need, we designed a simple WordPress website that acted as a home base for all logistical information and content for our online event. The site launched one full week before the event. It was updated with the live session recordings afterwards, so Seedlings could access the content as their schedule allowed. While in-person events allow participants to connect through activities and interactions within a physical, immersive space, digital events do not share the same quality. Instead of attempting to recreate an in-person event on a digital platform, it was important to remain flexible and provide multiple opportunities to participate over an extended period of time.

However, there were a few ways our team sought to deliver some physical elements of the conference to the Seedlings at home. In June, Sonoe Nakasone, our grant’s Community Archivist and Chaitra Powell, our Project Director, mailed all ten Seedlings participants Archivist-in-a-Backpack kits, so they could put content from the workshop sessions into practice in real time. These kits include tools like a portable scanner and acid-free archival materials, along with oral history recording tools like a Zoom audio recorder.

Throughout the Community-Driven Archives grant, the staff has sought to thoughtfully reflect on our partners’ feedback on our practices and content. At the end of the July digital workshop, our method for gathering feedback was mostly the same as it would have been in person—by having conversations. Using the breakout room function on Zoom, staff facilitated conversations with three-to-four Seedling participants to debrief and discuss their experience as well as share feedback on the content. Many Seedlings reflected on their familiarity with the content prior to the program, but cited that their participation in the program helped them to fill gaps in their skills, such as planning an oral history, and to better understand archival systems and concepts like copyright and digitization. Most importantly, these debrief conversations created time and space for group members to share how COVID-19 changed or didn’t change their archival projects, and on the new skills they had to learn in order to carry out their work.

Takeaways

For a  project that seeks to ground itself in place and community, it was challenging to organize a digital event that helps people build connections to strangers through a shared online experience. Since none of the Seedlings have met each other in person, we, as CDA staff, have used our  knowledge of each of their projects to encourage Seedlings to make connections with one another.

Prior to the pandemic, many Seedlings planned to conduct oral history interviews with elders in their communities but have had to change projects or recording methods to accommodate safety recommendations. Their struggles and triumphs while navigating these changes became an often-discussed topic amongst Seedlings and staff throughout the workshop.

By creating a hybrid method for conveying content and facilitating discussion we were able to accomplish our two main goals:

  • To support Seedlings with skills and information to help them carry out their projects
  • To facilitate meaningful discussions that built connections among participants

Additionally, Seedlings provided us with constructive feedback that will help us improve our archival practice and better understand the needs of independent archives and individual history keepers. We hope that our digital content, experiences, and collaborative partnership model will inform UNC Libraries and other institutions into the future.

Since this July workshop, it is now clear that the pandemic will not dissipate in time for us to gather in-person as staff and Seedlings participants during the duration of our grant-funded project. And while Seedlings have encountered many obstacles to their projects, to say nothing of the immense challenges of this year, each has remained persistent in their archival work. Most have seen their project plans, especially those involving oral histories, change dramatically, and have taken on new skills such as recording interviews on Zoom or using camcorders or audio recorders mic’d from a six-foot distance, in order to continue. Others have focused on digital accessibility, transcribing and captioning existing interviews for the public.

For many Seedlings, their participation in this initiative is the just the beginning of more extensive projects to document the history of their communities. In celebration of our partnership over the last year, the CDA grant team will unveil a digital exhibition facilitated by UNC Libraries that will highlight each Seedling’s archival or historical project, coming soon.

For more about the Archival Seedlings initiative on the Southern Sources blog:

Archival Seedlings: Resourcing Local Collaborators Across the American South

All Hands on Deck at Hobson City’s Museum: Interview with Pauline Cunningham

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter: @SoHistColl_1930 #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

Archival Seedlings: Putting Our Values into Practice, the 2020 Edition

Throughout the harrowing challenges of 2020, our Community-Driven Archives Team has been in conversation with our Archival Seedlings program collaborators about the shifting needs and scope of their projects. We recognized early on that due to capacity challenges posed for folks juggling their archival projects with paid work, family life, and other commitments, all while facing the many challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, Seedlings needed tools, digital resources, and support for some of the especially time-consuming aspects of their work.

Here are some ways our collaboration with Seedlings participants got creative this year to resource local history initiatives with the support of our grant funds:

  • We worked with William Isom, II to hire a Black in Appalachia volunteer to transcribe over two dozen video interviews with alumni and friends of Swift Memorial Institute, a former historic African-American college in Rogersville, TN, for a history project in collaboration with the Swift Museum.
  • We helped the Tuskegee History Center in Tuskegee, AL join the Association of African American Museums so the community museum’s director, Deborah Gray, could receive online support during the COVID-19 crisis.
  • We hired a local-area videographer to film interviews with eight local elders about their life histories through Phyllis Miller’s project in Grambling, Louisiana.
  • We connected Lisa Withers and Amber Amberson to web hosting services for their digital collections. They have each decided to start an online archive to ensure community use and access of collections outside of predominately white museums, archives, and historical societies. Lisa’s project focuses on descendant communities of former North Carolina Green Book sites, and Amber is documenting locals’ memories in the small historically Black town of Smithville, Texas.
  • We worked with D.L. Grant to caption video interviews on Zoom with descendants of Prudence Curry, the first director of the historically African-American George Washington Carver Branch Library in San Antonio, TX, and with Sylvia Stanback to caption her Zoom interview with a relative about their family’s chapter of Greensboro, NC Black history during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.
  • We worked with Whitney Peckman and her local collaborators to share her documentary video about the former historic African-American Dunbar School in East Spencer, NC with the greater community through a viewing station in East Spencer Town Hall.

Learn more about Archival Seedlings and check out some of the tools and resources that we created for the program on our website.

For more about the Archival Seedlings program on the Southern Sources blog:

Archival Seedlings: Resourcing Local Collaborators Across the American South

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter @SoHistColl_1930 #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

Archival Seedlings: Resourcing Local Collaborators Across the American South

From the beginning of our grant-funded project, we at the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) Team at UNC Libraries have endeavored to envision programs that reorient traditional archival standards, workflows, and practices to be in deeper alignment with the needs and goals of historically marginalized history keepers across the South. One of our initiatives, Archival Seedlings, aims to extend the reach of our support beyond our four pilot partners, to directly resource individual projects that amplify community histories underrepresented in dominant archives, including ours at UNC-Chapel Hill.

What Is “Archival Seedlings”?

Launched in January 2020, Archival Seedlings is a 15-month program supporting the development of small community archives projects led by individual history keepers across the South. The program emphasizes process over product, and all 10 participants, known as “Seedlings,” have participated in seven months of programmed online “how-to” workshops on topics relevant to archival and history projects. Over the course of the program, CDA team members have also supported Seedlings in developing projects of their choosing.

Community Archival Work within an Institutional Archive

Though some Seedlings participants are potentially interested in becoming professional archivists, most are not. Never intended as a professional primer, our program focuses on supporting each project’s unique needs, rooted in the specific community it intends to serve. It operates from a consideration of best practices for community care and stewardship of historical records.

What makes Archival Seedlings unique?

  • It focuses on storytelling as well as access and preservation of historical records. Because many history keepers want to preserve as well as share histories that may not otherwise be recorded or documented, our program emphasizes the value of storytelling. We hosted workshops on research methods, exhibition development, and creating a documentary to help Seedlings imagine the shapes that their stories could take.
  • It is not overly concerned with deliverables; we emphasize process over product. Each Seedlings project varies greatly in terms of scale. Some Seedlings are interviewing 1 or 2 people and sharing a few meaningful photos related to their story through a blog post. Others are conducting multiple oral history interviews, aiming to kick off a new digital community-based collection. On our end, we don’t set requirements aside from asking that Seedlings share a few examples with us from their collections, participate in workshops, and stay in touch with our team.
  • It compensates participants for their time. Though not paid an hourly rate or salary like project staff members, each Seedlings participant received a $4,500 stipend for spending time participating in our programmed webinars, workshops, and related events, and for working on their projects. This is a small way of acknowledging the time and labor that goes into making, saving, and sharing history.
  • It supports projects that benefit the communities they come from. We encourage the participants to consider the long-term availability of their project to their chosen audiences. When Seedlings consider why they embarked on these projects and who needs to access them, they often decide that their materials should stay in community rather than go to an institutional archival collection. This is one way that we challenge the historically extractive nature of institutional archives.

Leading from our Values

As with all of our community archives-focused initiatives, we acknowledge that there is no one way to do this work and that, at its heart, community-based collaboration is relational and fluid. We learn to be adaptable based on each individual collaboration and what it presents in terms of needs, opportunities, constraints, and possibilities.

As with all of our programs, our values are our compass; we emphasize the importance of developing a set of guiding principles to lead the way. Below are ours:

  • We center the needs of a diverse set of communities by listening carefully to local leaders and supporting local history keepers. Engaged communities build more representative archives and historical narratives.
  • We demystify institutional archives and support history keepers to steward their own collections and interpret their own histories.
  • We directly support and resource the work of our partners. These groups preserve and share underrepresented stories and empower communities as curators.
  • We act as a home base for history keepers, sharing archival and interpretive approaches that range from easy to complex and from affordable to high budget.

For more about Archival Seedlings on the Southern Sources blog:

Archival Seedlings: Putting Our Values into Practice, the 2020 Edition

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter: @SoHistColl_1930 #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

Copyright and Community-Driven Archives

When it comes to protecting intellectual property that is part of your or your community’s history, it helps to understand what legal rights apply to your materials. 

Community-based archives are a pathway for groups of people to exercise self-determination over the collection and interpretation of their histories. Historically marginalized communities draw on community-archival methods to preserve and share stories that are often missing from institutional archives and dominant historical narratives.

It is especially important to many of our partner history keepers through our Community-Driven Archives initiative to know what rights they and their community collaborators have over their stories and historical records. This requires an understanding of copyright and how it works.

What is copyright?

According to Anne Gilliland, Scholarly Communications Officer with UNC Libraries, copyright is your legal right to determine the permitted uses of your tangible expressions of creative work. What does that mean and what kinds of things amount to “tangible expressions of creative work”?

This is not an exhaustive list, but it does give you a sense of what kinds of things are legally under copyright:

    • Musical compositions
    • Films
    • Artwork/media
    • Oral histories
    • Photographs

One big takeaway is that copyright does not cover non-recorded stories and ideas.

Many of our collaborators are rightfully concerned about their control over future uses of their shared stories and materials. Many have heard about or know of an example of someone’s story making its way to Hollywood or on the radio or even featured on a city-sponsored project without the knowledge of that person or their descendants.

While acknowledging on one hand the gaps, omissions, and injustices of U.S. laws, our goal as a Community-Driven Archives Team is to help history keepers get familiar with a few best practices for making use of the legal protections that are available. We also want to help groups and institutions who work with oral histories and other people’s historical materials take the proper steps before making use of someone’s story or creative work.

Copyright Best Practices

Best Practice #1: Assume that every creative work is under copyright until you know that it is not.

the Old Well at UNC-Chapel Hill surrounded by Spring flowers
An example of an image in the public domain featuring UNC-Chapel Hill. Credit: Jack a lanier, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Most creative works are automatically under copyright unless the copyright holder (the creator or their designated heirs) explicitly gives away their copyright or the record goes into the public domain, which usually takes about a century.

Just because you found it online does not mean that you are free to share it. Most online materials are under copyright.

Look for ways to seek permission to share or reuse the item in question. Sometimes, a simple web search will clue you in on permission requirements; other times, you may need to take the time to track down heirs and make phone calls to descendants for consent. If you are working with an institutional archive, staff members can help you track down creators for permission. If you cannot find someone to provide consent, then you can investigate fair use, which is a framework to help you assess whether you can fairly justify the use of copyrighted materials without the permission of the creator or someone authorized to provide consent.

The item may also be free to use because it is in the public domain. This applies to many items, including those created by the federal government and those that date back to the early 20th century or earlier. To learn what groups of historical and cultural materials have passed into the public domain, you can check out this chart updated each year by Cornell University.

A black and white image of four white male-presenting people in front of the Old Well at UNC
This 19th-century photograph of the Old Well at UNC-Chapel Hill is another example of an image in the public domain, this time because it is over a century old. From the North Carolina Collection at the Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC-Chapel Hill

Best Practice #2: For oral histories, interviewers should always ask their interviewees for their consent and their terms of reuse.

According to our lawyer-in-residence, Anne Gilliland, oral histories are considered a joint creation between the interviewer and the interviewee.

For interviewers:

Bernetiae leans over a group of seated African American women to assist them during a training
CDA Team member Bernetiae Reed leads an oral history training in San Antonio, TX, November 2017. Courtesy UNC CDAT

If you are a community archivist wanting to preserve and/or share oral histories you have collected, you should create a consent form where your interviewee gives you permission to record their story. This form should outline the allowed uses for the recorded interview. Consent forms also ask about additional restrictions, if any, that interviewees require for the sharing of their interview. If it applies, interviewees should also be informed about the institutional repository (i.e. archive, library, museum, etc.) to which their materials will be donated.

A license is a way of communicating the terms for allowed uses of creative works (such uses include: display, distribution, performance, reproduction, derivative works, and audio transmission). For example, a license can state that someone’s interview should be used only for educational and/or nonprofit purposes, or only if the original format is not altered (i.e. no derivative works can be adapted from the interview). Creative Commons licenses are popular and give creators standardized language for their terms of reuse.

For interviewees:

Unless the form you sign says so explicitly, signing a consent form does not mean that you are giving away your copyright. Creators maintain their copyright for at least the duration of their lifetime, unless they formally agree to end their copyright. If you are being interviewed, it is important that you feel comfortable with the terms of the interview. Take the time to read through the consent form to make sure you agree with the license laid out there. Read the section above for more information about creating a license.

Best Practice #3: Be upfront about your mission and goals with your audience and your collaborators.

Why are you making your works or materials available to members of the public? Make it clear to potential audiences. For example, if you want to share your creative works with public audiences for educational purposes, that tells you something about your mission. Perhaps your mission is to inspire people in Chapel Hill, NC to take action for environmental justice through sharing nature photographs from the 1970s and 80s with web users. Write up that mission and share it on your website. If you are concerned that people might use your photographs for purposes outside the scope of your mission, make sure your license for reuse is somewhere prominent and easy to find on your site.

If you are asking someone to sign a consent form that would allow you to share their digitized image, oral history, or creative work with public audiences, be upfront with them about the mission and goals of your project. This helps build trust. If your collaborator likes your project and appreciates your intended use of their materials, they will be less likely to require additional restrictions be placed on the material, which will make it easier for you and others to use and share it over time. Again, it is important to make sure you and your collaborator agree on the terms of use for their materials, and that the related license is easily accessible with the terms of use clearly presented to public audiences.

Best Practice #4: For sensitive materials, consider alternative ways of sharing them with selected audiences.

If you are concerned with how members of the public will share or use your materials, think about limiting your terms of use.

For digitized items (physical papers or photographs that are scanned and made into a digital file), consider creating a private space online to share them only with select members of your community. Or share them widely but upload a version of the file that is stamped with a watermark to prevent unintended uses. Signing a consent form to share your digitized materials with any history keeper or institutional partner does not mean you are giving away your copyright.

If you are sending items to a repository (e.g. institutional archive, library, museum, etc.), make sure you are also clear with that institution on your terms of use. Review all forms they ask you to sign to ensure that you retain your copyright and ask that your preferred license be included (a.k.a. your terms of use). Let the institution know if you intend for your materials to be a loan or a permanent gift. If it is a loan, indicate when and under which conditions materials should be returned to their owner.

If you are worried about any unintended uses of digitized materials shared with a repository, consider asking your institutional partner to keep your materials off the internet or to share them selectively, as outlined above.

Additional Resources

For more about community-based archives and considerations for project partnership on the Southern Sources blog:

What’s In an Archive? Deciding Where Your Historical Materials Will Live

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter: @SoHistColl_1930 #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

All Hands on Deck at Hobson City’s Museum: Interview with Pauline Cunningham

In August 1899, the determined leaders of Mooree Quarters, the Black neighborhood of Oxford, Alabama, formed a separate town: Hobson City. It would be the first incorporated Black municipality in Alabama and the second in the nation.

Black and white images of road signs, with one priminent sign reading: Welcome to the Historic Hobson City
Still image from Hobson City: From Peril to Promise by Hiztorical Vision Productions, www.hiztoricalvp.org, Courtesy Theo Moore

Over the next several decades, Hobson City developed into a magnet for Black excellence and entertainment in the South. Today, Mayor Alberta McCrory wants to share the remarkable history of Hobson City and other historic Black towns in Alabama at the Hobson City Museum.

Group of femme-presenting Black people wearing white gloves around a table covered with historical objects, which they are wrapping in white paper
Left, front to back: Pauline Cunningham; Michelle Robinson (Spelman College). Right, front to back: Bobbie Jean Wright; Dories Jennings; Mayor Alberta McCrory. Packing museum collections at Hobson City Museum at Town Hall. Courtesy UNC CDAT

Through a partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries’ Community Driven Archives (CDA) project, Hobson City Museum hosted a workshop in March 2020 that focused on caring for museum collections. Three UNC Libraries staff members provided training to residents of Hobson City and nearby Anniston on how to clean, handle, store, and inventory plaques, textiles, trophies, and photographs that document the contributions of local leaders such as James “Pappy” Dunn. Town Hall Clerk Pauline Cunningham was the Hobson City coordinator for the workshop and also participates in another CDA archival training program called Archival Seedlings.  I met with Pauline over Zoom to reflect on our collaboration in March and the future of the Hobson City Museum.

Room filled with museum cases and an array of plaques, trophies and other historical items
Trophies, plaques, and other museum items at the Hobson City Museum at Town Hall. Courtesy UNC CDAT

Conversation with Hobson City, Alabama Collaborator Pauline Cunningham

Q: What is the purpose of Hobson City Museum?

Pauline Cunningham: To be educational and show the history of Hobson City and who was all involved in making a change in Hobson City.  We started with [James] “Pappy” Dunn because he invested so much time, money, and energy in making a change for Hobson City.

Q: Who do you see as the visitors, and what kind of information do you hope they get out of it?

PC: We want people from all over—all over the United states, all over the world—to be able to come, see, learn, and understand the struggle that Hobson City has had in the past; and maybe in due time we’ll also show the struggle that’s happening right now.  Not because of COVID-19, just because of the economy.

Q: What was the museum’s goal for the workshop in March, and was it met?

Group of femme-presenting Black people around a table with computers and putting photographs and papers into folders.
Left: Dories Jennings. Right, front to back: Gina Young; Pauline Cunningham. Describing museum collections. Hobson City Museum at Town Hall. Courtesy UNC CDAT

PC: Not knowing anything, I feel like we learned so much. We learned how to archive, how to clean with the right agents.  We learned how to do so many things. How to preserve. It was so educational. I think my downfall is going to be, the people [who] were there this year to learn, [they] might not be there when [COVID-19] is over. I plan to try to write everything down and to make what we call a SOP [Standard Operating Procedures] for the military—how to do each step. I would love to add a DVD to it with all the videos that we had when learning from the different presenters [our series of how-to webinars through the Archival Seedlings program].

Q: The workshop happened as COVID-19 cases started to spread nationally. How did COVID-19 affect the museum in March?  How has it continued to affect the museum?

PC: It really went to a standstill. I’m older. I’m in that population that you don’t need to be out there unless you have to be, so it really went to a standstill; that’s the bad thing. The good news, I guess, will be once I start doing the SOP [manual], maybe somebody else can pick it up and keep doing some things; but right now, we’re at a standstill because of COVID-19.

Q: What do you think is the number one challenge going forward with skills gained through the workshop?

Two femme-presenting Black people, one seated cleaning a trophy, the other person, standing, looking on.
Sitting: Pauline Cunningham. Standing: Bobbie Jean Wright. Cleaning museum collections. Hobson City Museum at Town Hall. Courtesy UNC CDAT

PC: The memory that I won’t have if I don’t write it down. And the challenge is going to be getting the right people to continue to help with the museum, even though it doesn’t seem like a large project to some people. But it’s getting that volunteerism to come out and help—to work for the City, to get the City up and running—and I believe those that decide to do it, they’ll do it from the heart. So that’s going to be my challenge: to find the right people to make it continue to go.

Q: Should those people be in the community or people outside?

PC: Both really. Reality: when you guys were down in March, everybody there except for two people were from outside [Hobson City]…including myself [Pauline is a resident of nearby Anniston, AL.].

Q: What is the number one challenge of the museum?

PC: Space…availability for the museum. The challenge is going to be to utilize the space the best way to display or to show what we want to. Part of it [is] going to be the videos of people talking about the history, and some of the pictures, and some of the stuff we’ll just scan to make the rotating [slideshow] and voice behind it—where it came from, who donated it, and why it’s important—that sort of thing. That’s the challenge—putting [in] the right mix for such a small space.

Q: What was your favorite part of the workshop?

A peek inside a box filled with items wrapped in paper
Plaques in the museum collection labeled and stored. Hobson City Museum in Town Hall. Courtesy UNC CDAT

PC: I have two: One was archiving and learning how to do it right, so you can go back and find it on your archive list and where you stored it. And two was the cleaning of the artifacts. That to me was very critical because I would have messed it up! Because I would have used some regular cleaning detergent type stuff. So that—those two—how to store and clean and archive, that was tremendous. I loved it. I loved it.

Q: What question do you wish I asked you? Is there more you’d like to say?

PC: Just that I want to make sure I’m able to put the SOP [manual] together on how to do each thing. If I die tomorrow, somebody else can pick up the ball and run with it and know how to do it right. If I can pull all that together, I would love it. It’s a win-win for the City and for the education provided to us.

Want to learn more about Hobson City?  Visit the town website and watch the documentary Hobson City: From Peril to Progress, 27 min, by Hiztorical Vision Productions.

Read more about our work in collaboration with Hobson City, AL and other members of the Historically Black Towns and Settlements Allliance (HBTSA) on the Southern Sources blog:

Next Stop: The Great State of Alabama

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter @SoHistColl_1930 #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

Storytelling through Community-Driven Archives

Our unique approach to archival workflows is one thing that sets community-driven archives approaches apart from mainstream archival methods. Traditionally, archivists stick to access and preservation and leave interpretation and storytelling to the researchers. But what happens when we listen to what our audiences want? We find ways to help them tell meaningful stories about their communities’ history.

Our Core Audiences and Understanding What Matters to Them

Within our community-driven archives (CDA) project, audience means a lot to us. This has been true since the beginning of our grant project, and it is getting clearer as we head towards wrapping it up and sharing what we have learned.

Our project strives to support and amplify historical projects by and for communities underrepresented in institutional archives. Our priority audience is community-based archive projects: groups of people who are interested in creating an archival project documenting their own community. We also work with individual history keepers: people, like family genealogists and community organizers, wanting to document and share histories currently missing from dominant archives and narratives due to legacies of injustice.

While brainstorming for what will go on our new project website (coming soon), our team looked at all the tools and resources that we have created with our project partners since the start of the grant. We asked ourselves, what kinds of resources are most useful to our core audiences?

Title page of Storytelling webinar with UNC logo
Learn about documentary storytelling in this CDA webinar with Theo Moore of Hiztorical Vision Productions.

We noticed that one of the most common resource requests that we receive from our community collaborators is for more tools about storytelling. In response, we have created new resources on topics like “the art of storytelling” and “how to create an exhibition.”

But what do we mean by storytelling and why should archives professionals care?

Making a Case for Storytelling in Community Archives Projects

Archives have historically prioritized the access and preservation of historical records over the interpretation of history, leaving the latter to researchers. For community archives projects, we believe it must be different.

Community archives projects address gaps in the dominant historical record and complicate mainstream historical narratives. Communities want their stories told on their own terms. Through building an archive, the collecting of history supports the (re)telling of it.

In many cases, the stories uncovered through community-based collections are not otherwise known. Due to legacies of racism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression, histories by and for Black, Indigenous, people of color, women, and LGBTIQ people have been hidden or silenced. As a result, beyond building their collection, many history keepers also want to broadcast the stories they’ve researched and curated through their archive. Many history keepers want to control how their community’s stories get told, rightfully questioning outside researchers’ and institutions’ motivations.

a museum exhibit with a backdrop of a church featuring men's and women's clothing on two mannequins near a table of historical artifacts
One section of the EKAAMP, one of our pilot partners, exhibition on the Eastern KY Social Club, 2018.

Our collaborators and partners share their communities’ stories through a variety of methods: exhibitions, public programs, websites, social media and blog posts, documentaries, short videos, and more.
We believe that archival professionals like ourselves working with community archives projects must consider the importance of storytelling. Through community collaboration, we have the opportunity to support both the safeguarding and sharing of stories.

Ideas for Archival Institutions

Since the beginning of our community-driven archives project, our work has extended to train and resource history keepers to share stories they uncover through developing a collection.

Oral histories easily lend themselves to exhibitions and other vehicles for sharing stories with visitors. Members of our team have trained local history keepers to conduct oral histories as a path to preserving memories. From there, we have worked with our community partners to incorporate oral history clips and collections materials into physical and digital exhibitions and short documentary videos that narrate important stories. One of our pilot partners, the Appalachian Student Health Coalition, created a web-based storytelling project that draws on video interviews and data visualizations to share its members’ contributions to rural healthcare in Appalachia.

Through our Archival Seedlings program, we help our ten resident Seedlings develop an archival collection and share their historical project with chosen audiences. For some Seedlings, the websites, videos, blog posts, and exhibits they create to highlight their collection are the only places their audiences can find those histories. While some Seedlings are working with traditional institutions and repositories to preserve and share their finished projects, others are choosing to keep their collections with history keepers in their own communities and to take on project promotion and outreach themselves.

A Black person seated in from of a sign in the background reading "Swift Memorial Jr. College Reunion"
Stella Gudger, Founder of the Swift Museum in Rogerville, TN, from Archival Seedling William Isom II’s interview with her.

One Seedlings participant, William Isom II, is compiling a collection of video interviews with alumni from the historically Black Swift Memorial Institute in Rogersville, TN into a video that will be on view in the museum located on Swift’s historic campus. In addition, one of our pilot partners, the Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project (EKAAMP) has recently launched an exhibition sharing the oral histories and archival materials it collected through community-based research. These are great examples of how a collection can be “put to work” to share stories.

Storytelling Resources

Storytelling resources are available along with other related tools and trainings on our website.

For more about community-based archives on the Southern Sources blog:

What’s in an Archive? Deciding Where Your Historical Materials Will Live

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter @SoHistColl_1930 #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

What’s in an Archive? Deciding Where Your Historical Materials Will Live

Many home archivists and community-based researchers face a tough set of questions when deciding where their personal or organizational collections will live longer term. Not everyone is able to or wants to be responsible for the long-term care of archival materials, but many still wonder, “Who can I trust to be the steward of my important historical records?”

The answer is different for everyone, depending on what you are looking for in an archival steward. Stories from our Archival Seedlings program may offer insights and inform the questions you might want to ask to help guide your decision.

Since January, our Community-Driven Archives Team (CDAT) has been working with a group of ten researchers and budding archivists connected to our four community partners. We are supporting each researcher to learn new skills in working with historical resources. The skills they learn range from conducting oral histories to creating digital archives, and each researcher is developing a project of their choosing. Together, these researchers and their projects are the focus of a new initiative, the Archival Seedlings program. Participants in the program are known as “Seedlings.”

One Seedling, D.L., based in San Antonio, TX, is starting an archival collection on the life of Prudence Curry, the first director of the George Washington Carver Branch Library in San Antonio, the city’s Black library during Jim Crow. D.L. currently serves as the manager of Carver Library. Though Curry was a pathbreaking African American leader, very little has been formally documented about her life. Most of the stories about Prudence Curry live on in the memories of people in her community.

D.L. wants to make sure that Curry’s legacy will live on beyond individual memories through building an archival collection to benefit her wider community. He wants this collection to strengthen the preservation of Black history in San Antonio.

Library room with book shelves and tables and chairs with seated patrons and staff at the front
Inside the George Washington Carver Branch Library, ca. 1930.

Luckily, D.L. is a member and researcher with the San Antonio African American Archive and Museum (SAAACAM), an independent community archive that has spent the past few years building up a staff and volunteer base in order to collect, preserve, and interpret San Antonio’s African American history. D.L. plans to send the beginnings of the Prudence Curry collection to SAAACAM, which he feels will be its perfect home.

Group of SAAACAM leaders with SHC staff members on their visit to San Antonio, TX.

But what if you don’t live somewhere with an independent community archive that is the perfect fit for your project?

Maybe you have decided that you want to preserve treasured historical materials for future generations, but also want to keep those collections in your community. How should you decide whom to reach out to?

This is a question that some Seedlings program participants have asked themselves. It is also an important question in community-driven archives work; a central tenet of our approach lies in acknowledging that, for history keepers, sending collections to an academic archive, museum, or institution like UNC is only one option among many.

Another Seedling, Sylvia, based in Greensboro, NC, is creating an archival collection centered on local African American history during the Civil Rights era sit-in movement of the 1960’s. Specifically, she is conducting oral history interviews with a group of her former classmates and teachers at Dudley High School and North Carolina A&T State University who hold these stories in their memories.

Rather than donate her oral history collection to an institution that has been historically disconnected from her community, Sylvia has decided to pursue a partnership with a local Black-led community organization. She has decided that her collection will best live on under the care of an organization that has long been working directly for the betterment of her community.

When making a decision about where to preserve your cherished historic materials, considering asking yourself:

  • What are my long-term preservation goals?
  • How do they fit with the long-term interest and capacity of this potential partner?
  • How long will this potential partner be able to retain the materials?
  • How does this potential partner’s goals, values, and attitudes fit with my own and/or those of my community?
  • How will community members be able to access collections materials in the future through this potential partner?

Then, consider how the answers to these questions affect your decision about where and with whom to partner. Remember, it is your and your community’s choice to decide on the best steward for your historical records.

Check out the short videos on the Resources page of our website to learn more about working with institutional and community-based archives to meet your needs.

For more about community-based archives on the Southern Sources blog:

Partnering with The San Antonio African American Community Archives and Museum (SAAACAM)

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter @SoHistColl_1930 #CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC

Transforming Knowledge, Transforming Libraries Reportback

On May 1, the University of California-Irvine Libraries hosted a unique conference on Community-Driven Archives (via Vimeo): Transforming Knowledge, Transforming Libraries. This virtual summit featured a group of professional leaders in the field. Most of them, like us with the SHC’s Community-Driven Archives Team (CDAT), work with community groups as institutional collaborators within an academic archive.

What were some of our highlights?

Transforming Knowledge

Archivist Nancy Godoy presented on Arizona State University’s Community-Driven Archives Mellon Grant project (2017-20), which scaled up an initiative that she had led since 2012. The ASU Library’s project has focused primarily on collaborations with Latinx, LGBTQ, and BIPOC communities to support historically underrepresented groups of people in deepening their sense of ownership over their collective histories. It collaborates with participants to help them learn how to preserve and share their stories and archives with their community.

For the SHC’s Community-Driven Archives Team, one of the core tenets of our community-driven archives model is an ethos of community control. This requires us as archives professionals and institutional collaborators to release any need for control over how our community partners choose to organize and interpret their own histories. It means thinking about what our community partners need before considering institutional pressures and community outsiders’ research interests.

Under Godoy’s leadership, ASU’s Community-Driven Archives (CDA) initiative does this. For example, the CDA project has chosen to move all community-focused events off-campus, because, otherwise, “it wasn’t welcoming for the community.” Instead, Godoy and her colleagues host these bilingual Spanish-English events at local community centers, POC-owned bookstores, and public libraries. Participants in ASU’s community archives and preservation workshops come to work on their own collections or those of fellow community members, utilizing archival tools resourced through grant funds with ASU staff support.

A Powerpoint slide featuring photos of Black and Latinx community members reviewing archival materials
Nancy Godoy presenting on ASU’s Community-Driven Archives Project.

In Godoy’s words, her goal for this work is to create intergenerational spaces of healing for individuals, “driven by justice and a deep love for their themselves and their communities, to learn and transform archival knowledge as they dismantle the power structures that have dehumanized them.”

Transforming Libraries

Shift Design Director of Equity Initiatives, Bergis Jules, presented on the Architecting Sustainable Futures gathering that he helped to organize and host in New Orleans in 2018. This gathering convened a cross-section of people working with community archives: leaders of community-based archives, archives professionals, and current and potential funders. Together, they brainstormed ideas for sustainable funding models to support communities in collecting, preserving, and sharing their own histories with support from outside institutions.

Jules presented from the report on the gathering, focusing on the report’s recommendations for university library partners of community-based archives, including us with the CDAT at UNC.

Bergis Jules presenting on the Architecting Sustainable Futures report (pictured).

The recommendations are straightforward and give those of us working in university library archives much to consider:

  • Don’t be extractive, which asks universities to acknowledge the power and privilege they hold while in collaboration with community-based archives and to ensure that community partners benefit first and foremost from collaboration.
  • Practice equity, which requires that archives professionals honor the wisdom of community archivists and treat them as they would their peers in the field, with regard to working relationships and fair compensation.
  • Be transparent, which means providing clear information about goals, resources, timeline, and deliverables during joint project planning as well as grant applications and grant management.
  • Honor the wisdom of the community, which asks institutional partners to recognize that community history keepers may have their own ways of preserving their histories that have been working for them, and that we have much to learn through any partnership.

Similarly, Michelle Caswell, Assistant Professor of Archival Studies and Director of the Community Archives Lab at UCLA, spoke on her approach to teaching community archives as part of an MLIS program. Caswell shared an overview of her current course on community archives, which uses a justice-based archival framework that draws participants in as co-creators of “politically generative,” transformative spaces.

Caswell underscored the task facing those of us working within academic institutions in support of community archives: We have a responsibility to pass on traditional archival methods so that our students can learn existing practices and get a job, while simultaneously calling those practices into question and demanding innovation. Caswell calls this “Critical Archival Pedagogy.”

Powerpoint slide featuring a cyclical model for the three stages of Critical Archival Pedagogy: "Critique oppressive practices, Imagine liberatory practices, and Enact practices"
Michelle Caswell presenting on her model for Critical Archival Pedagogy.

We with the CDAT are incorporating these reflections into our ongoing work to strengthen relationships with our community partners, the diversity of users of SHC collections, and MLIS students hungry to learn more about justice-based approaches to archives. We also hope that our fellow libraries and archives professionals will join us in making the time to learn more about these lessons and taking them to heart.

The Community-Driven Archives Project at UNC-Chapel Hill is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Follow us on Twitter @SoHistColl_1930

#CommunityDrivenArchives #CDAT #SHC