“Something that feels like a community”: the role of personal stories in building community-based participatory archives

Participatory Description and Metadata Quality in Rapid Response Archives

“…Ongoing assessment will allow curators to identify gaps or discrepancies for remediation, and subjective standards can be moderated by the curation team in keeping with a participatory model. Opportunities exist for cultural and GLAM organizations to partner with educational, community or religious organizations, engaging a gemeinschaft of tag gardeners among students or retirees (Roeschley 2019).…”

Archival knowledge in the field of personal archiving: an exploratory study based on grounded theory

“…In recent years, the connection between the two fields of personal and community archives and archiving has attracted the attention of scholars (Han, 2019; Roeschley and Kim, 2019; Cifor and Gilliland, 2016). Community archives play a major role as sites to which people can donate the items that they have kept as their “personal archive” (Gilliland and Halilovich, 2017), and individuals make connections to their communities through their personal objects and stories, through the sharing of personal archival objects and oral histories to the community-based participatory archive, the community record and community collective memory are shaped (Roeschley and Kim, 2019). Understanding PA practices is therefore important to understanding the individual drive to participate in a community-based participatory archive, to share a personal archive and to share the archive's stories with one's community (Roeschley and Kim, 2019).…”

“…Community archives play a major role as sites to which people can donate the items that they have kept as their “personal archive” (Gilliland and Halilovich, 2017), and individuals make connections to their communities through their personal objects and stories, through the sharing of personal archival objects and oral histories to the community-based participatory archive, the community record and community collective memory are shaped (Roeschley and Kim, 2019). Understanding PA practices is therefore important to understanding the individual drive to participate in a community-based participatory archive, to share a personal archive and to share the archive's stories with one's community (Roeschley and Kim, 2019). In the community archives, the affective archival value called by Cifor (2016) plays a very important role, for many contributors, the record is given meaning through the emotional ties or bonds that the record represents.…”

“…In the community archives, the affective archival value called by Cifor (2016) plays a very important role, for many contributors, the record is given meaning through the emotional ties or bonds that the record represents. Therefore, ideas of archival value can be further contextualised within the affective sphere when we examine how community-based participatory archive contributors view their records as evidence that establishes and reinforces their identities (Roeschley and Kim, 2019). Although we still do not know whether the recontextualizations of archival value will affect PA motivation and behaviour, it is certain that the contribution and sharing of personal archives through the community level will inevitably promote the realisation of personal archive value at the community level to make PA practice more meaningful.…”

“…It is worth noting that, connecting and contributing to shared identities and histories is indeed also a PA need that has been identified by Noah Lenstra, who discovered people wanted to “make connections between things they have in their own PA and things that may be in other people's personal archives, between one person's history and other people's histories” (Ashenfelder, 2013). Unfortunately, while there is research that explores PDA practices, there is little attention paid in the archival literature and education to how individuals use and preserve personal objects like family photographs in order to make connections between themselves and the past (Roeschley and Kim, 2019).…”