| Abstract | Community archives are archives created or accumulated, described, and/or preserved by individuals and community groups who desire to document their cultural heritage based on shared experiences, interests, and/or identities, sometimes without the traditional intervention of formally trained archivists, historians, and librarians. Instead, the engaged community members determine the scope and contents of the community archive, often with a focus on a significant shared event, such as the Ferguson unrest (2014). Community archives are created in response to needs defined by the members of a community, who may also exert control over how materials are used.Although local and regional societies, churches, and museums have collected community records for generations, community archives increased in number and popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which Anne Gilliland and Andrew Flinn believe may be due in part to increased interest in oral history and community representation in response to the emerging anti-war, anti-establishment, civil rights, and student activism movements of the 1960s.The work of community archives received little recognition from archival scholars until the early 2000s, when several published studies explored the relationships between communities, archives, and collective memory. Jeannette Bastian’s Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History is considered to be one of the most significant of these publications. Bastian discusses the experience of the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Virgin Islanders' efforts to rebuild their “house of memory” after losing local control of nearly all governmental documents and records to their historical and current colonial rulers. Bastian's work introduces several key concepts, including the notion of a "community of records" to acknowledge that communities are entities that both create records and whose input is needed to contextualize the records they create. |
