Community archives and identities: documenting and sustaining community heritage

Lead Research Organisation: University College London
Department Name: Information Studies

Abstract

This project will investigate the importance of community archives, and in particular the role of these archives in the production of community identity via academic and popular public histories, exhibitions and other interactions. Although many of these initiatives have a relatively long history, the importance of these collections has only recently been widely recognised amongst cultural policy and professional organisations. However these collections provide many challenges to traditional professional practices (the scope of archival collections, the relationship with non-traditional user communities and issues of ownership / custodianship).

Increasingly the interactions of many communities, including transnational ones, are located in the virtual environment, so this project will also investigate community creation and use of virtual social and cultural spaces for the storage of and access to archive materials and examine the implications for traditional archival custodial approaches to preservation and access.

In UK terms, although there have been a number of innovative collaborations between community groups and professionals, this remains a significantly under-researched area with little evidence or theory to underpin and identify good practice. The uniqueness of this proposal lies both in its subject matter but also in its collaboration between academics in archives and records management, digital humanities, and cultural heritage along with professional archivists and the creators, users and custodians of community archives.

Community and community identity do not have fixed definitions but are fluid, dynamic concepts that are constantly in the process of being produced and transformed, capable of broad understanding. Whilst acknowledging this diversity this project will concentrate on in depth studies of four community archives and initiatives defined mainly, but not exclusively, by ethnicity and faith. Although these archives will differ in terms of size, length of time in existence, resources, physical or virtual location and community represented, there will also be points of commonality which will allow for the identification of some more general points, and to set the study in wider context. The choice of research methods, in-depth case studies backed up by a significant number of wide-ranging interviews, means that those most closely involved in community archives will help to mould the research framework that this project will develop and work to.

Among the questions that this project will seek to answer are:
How community archives contribute to the process of identity production among diasporic communities in Britain and what contribution might they make in terms of building a more cohesive multicultural society?
How does the preservation and long-term accessibility of diasporic community archives contribute to academic research and understanding of those communities and wider society?
What is the relationship between physical and virtual community archives and how do these different sites affect the ways in which identities are produced?
How can archivists support the development and sustainability of community archives and what do community initiatives contribute to professional understandings and practice?

The outcome will be a better understanding of the role of community archive initiatives in resisting misrepresentation and marginalisation, a clearer understanding of the relationship between formal archive professionals and the custodians of community archives and suggestions regarding best practice models for identifying and ensuring the long-term sustainability of significant community archives, both physical and virtual. Such findings will interest cultural policy makers, historians and cultural heritage academics interested in community history and identity, archivists and other cultural heritage professionals, and the creators, users and custodians of community archives.
 
Description The original aim of the project was to use what for archival research is a fairly innovative research approach, that of an ethnographic participant observation to better understand the motivations and impacts of independent community archive initiatives within a framework which included a public policy discourse regarding the impact of heritage (particularly notions such as community, identity and social cohesion) and also professional archive and heritage thinking and practice. This is, with a few significant exceptions, an important but under-research area of study. The project was designed to explore these questions within the context of independent archival activities initiated by and focussed on for the most part those of African and Asian heritage within the UK. We therefore proposed and carried out four ethnographic case studies (Eastside Community Heritage, Future Histories, rukus!, and Moroccan Memories) each lasting four months, with the Research Associate participating, observing and working with each of our case studies on an almost daily basis over a sustained period. Field notes and documentary evidence were supplemented by detailed interviews with volunteers, active participants and researchers. We further supplemented these case studies with interviews with another 30 individuals from 16 different organisations in London, Manchester, Northampton and Cardiff. When allied to a detailed multi-disciplinary literature review, this provided us with a large and incredibly rich dataset from which to draw our findings. The research has demonstrated that whilst there are similarities with other types of local community heritage projects, those archives (such as the ones we studied) which were strongly motivated to challenge misrepresentations and absences in mainstream historical narratives, are best understood not as heritage bodies at all but as social movement-type organisations with well-articulated political objectives. We concluded that the activities of the organisations we studied has resulted in the collection and preservation of significant historical materials that might otherwise not have survived. The survival and availability for use of these materials has impacted on the histories that can be told both by the organisations themselves and the people that they seek to represent, but ultimately also by mainstream institutions. Whilst rejecting the often reductive and essentialised notions of identity and community evident in much public policy discourse, we have found evidence of how working and interacting with this kind of material can support positive identifications and a sense of belonging with a group. However despite this record of achievement, independent archives face many serious challenges notably in sustaining themselves in the long-term, particularly with regard to funding, physical accommodation, digital preservation and human resources and we have made a number of significant and practical recommendations as to how these challenges might be met by the archives as well as by supportive professional and policy bodies. Interest in this project in the UK and abroad has been astonishing. We have received many more requests to speak on our research that we predicted and have published significantly more articles than originally intended. In particular professional and public policy bodies have been keen to speak to us in order to inform their dealings with independent archives. Our work has also been used by the individual archives themselves when facing their challenges and in dealing with mainstream institutions.
Exploitation Route This work has been used and cited by many people working in the area of community-based heritage in subsequent years.
Sectors Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections